Abstract

Numerous encounters of sense perception and materiality, which decenter the human and open up experience to radical alterity, permeate Romantic-era texts. Through various encounters with the nonhuman, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Smith take the human out of isolation and speculate on why it wasn’t always already embedded in an ecological continuum of existence. Their poetry reveals a sensitivity to the limits of humanism by investigating uncanny entanglements with nonhuman beings. These encounters invoke a pre-reflective engagement with the world. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment and posthumanist understandings of ecomaterialism, this essay explores the “strange kinship” between the human poet and nonhuman poetic subject. Barbauld, Robinson, and Smith critique dichotomous rationale, deconstruct species supremacy, and challenge human essentialism. By invoking the primacy of embodiment, these Romantic-era women writers offer shared corporeal investigations that move toward a posthuman ethos.