Kate Rigby's addition to the field of ecocritical studies of romanticism is wide-ranging and ambitious. The author tells us in the preface that she wrote the book in a garden suburb of Melbourne, and in this work she surveys texts from British and German romanticism and makes broad connections to present-day environmental problems and ideas, especially those of “deep ecology and ecosocialism, post-Heideggerian phenomenology and critical ecofeminism” (10). One of the explicit aims of the book is to continue the “ecocritical reevaluation of romanticism” begun by Jonathan Bate and Karl Kroeber, which sees romanticism broadly as “inaugurat[ing] a significant shift within European culture in thinking and speaking about the self, history, nature and the divine” (11). Equally ambitious, and certainly more utopian, another of the book's goals is that such a reevaluation might reveal “a return to a path not taken … that could lead us forward into an alternative, greener modernity” (1–2). Rigby frequently points out, however, that there are plenty of examples of sexist, classist, racist, and seriously “ungreen” strains in romantic period writing, particularly the habit of elevating the human mind above the natural world.

The argument about romanticism is framed against her understanding of M. H. Abrams's account of romanticism in Natural Supernaturalism, which she briefly summarizes as presenting romanticism as a “secularization” of traditional myths of renewal. Her “ecocritical rejoinder” is to argue that there are important strains of romanticism that, on the contrary, “reenchant” or “resacralize” the earth. They do this by giving examples of ways in which we can “ecstatically dwell” in and with the earth, a concept explicitly indebted to Bate's championing of Heidegger for making literature relevant to environmental thinking in the first place, since Heidegger sees language as one of the central ways in which we fashion (and thus refashion) our “being” in the world.

Rigby's book is valuable for broadening Anglo-American ecocritical inquiry into a European context. If romanticism is to be given some credit for reimagining our connections to the natural world, it needs to be understood as moving beyond nations and nationalism. By offering readings of prose and poetry by writers such as Goethe, Schilling, Humboldt, Eichendorff, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schelling in addition to the usual suspects from English romanticism (especially Wordsworth, Shelley, and Clare), Rigby does suggest that there was a broader cultural shift, during the long eighteenth century, of interest in the natural world as environment—a physical reality we inhabit, shaped by nonhuman forces. Another strength is that chapters are organized by kinds of environment (mountains and caves; rivers, lakes, and oceans; and forests and cities) that offer interesting contrasts in attitudes between nations and places and that explore some otherwise overlooked spaces.

But while Rigby's survey is broad, it is neither deep nor original. What is new here is the selection and combination of texts considered, not the arguments made about them. Readings of individual texts offer only a cursory sense of their critical history, and criticism that is cited generally shows her own arguments to be amplifying or repetitive. More seriously, the theoretical grounding, while conspicuous, is shallow. Philosophers and critics are generally referred to as codes for sweeping ideas, which are only vaguely explained and frequently do not cohere. For instance, though Abrams appears to provide an essential target for her argument, his argument is never explained or rebutted—presumably because closer scrutiny would reveal more similarity than difference. Likewise, though Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of the Enlightenment is said to underpin the book's political arguments, as well as its history of science, it is explained only as being “of considerable contemporary interest in its disclosure of the interstructuration of social domination, psychic repression, and the flawed project of the mastery of nature” (9). Ideas as grand and sweeping as these need explanation and evidence; the worthy ambitions of ecocriticism are undermined when such claims are presented as merely obvious, particularly when they are so dubious. Aside from her account of the environmentalist implications of Heidegger's philosophy (which is far from new), much of the theory of this book becomes a kind of name-dropping. Perhaps the most serious failing is that the idea announced in the book's title—that the best strains of romanticism merge a new interest in the physicality of the natural world with a concept of the sacred—is hardly explained at all. There is no definition of the sacred or divine and no explanation of how “resacralization” might work. Indeed, for long stretches of the book, interest in the divine or sacred disappears altogether. A more consistent point seems to be that romanticism depicts modes of “ecstatic dwelling,” but how or why this is connected to the sacred is far from clear.

Rigby's book offers ample evidence of one of the pitfalls of the common belief within ecocriticism that a very broad interdisciplinarity allows for the accumulation of topics and perspectives and will necessarily lead to something new and deep. While one would like to applaud Rigby's desire to make criticism relevant, her explicit attempts to use the complex and contradictory models of romanticism to offer insight into present-day political and ecological problems in the end appear largely as a means of demonstrating her own unsurprising green pieties. Concluding a short reading of Shelley's “Mont Blanc,” for example, which announces that the poem is deeply ambiguous, Rigby writes: “Whatever interpretation we give to Shelley's abyssal rendering of Mont Blanc, one thing is certain: in the years to come, poets would have to make way for tourist agents in transforming the silence and solitude of the Alps into a noisy and populous scene of human pleasure seeking” (164).

From here, Rigby goes on to mourn the diminution of wilderness and the eradication of wolves in Europe. That there appears to be no logic to this typical sequence of remarks undermines her ambition to use romanticism to offer genuine insight into contemporary problems. This is a shame because writers of the long eighteenth century clearly do have a lot to teach us about how to inhabit the world.