Environmental Justice and the Romantic ballad: Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border versus Lyrical Ballads

This paper explores two areas of Romantic rights, the one universal in its conceptualisation (environmental justice) and the other more particular (local communities and the ballad collections Lyrical Ballads and Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border). Both areas are concerned with Romanticism’s focus on a human environment that is intimately connected with - and inseparable from - landscapes and environments thought of in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as “natural.” The ecocritical field of environmental justice provides a theoretical underpinning. Two of the best-known — and distinctively different — ballad collections of the late 1790s and early1800s, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads and Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border are case studies with authorial and regional focus. If my paper experiments theoretically, as I hope it does, in its exploration of Romanticism’s treatment of environmental justice towards people, its adventure lies in an attempt to investigate ballad poetry’s active involvement with threatened or damaged conditions of existence that are both human and non-human.