This thesis is an exploration of the human-river relationship as it is depicted in Teisa: A Descriptive Poem of the River Teese, Its Towns and Antiquities by Anne Wilson, the Arun River Sonnet sequence in Elegiac Sonnets by Charlotte Smith, and Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada by Anna Brownell Jameson. I implement ecofeminism in my literary analysis of these texts, utilizing Donna Haraway’s concept of “Situated Knowledges” and Val Plumwood’s discourse on dualisms as the focal points of my theoretical framework. Romanticist scholarship has tended to focus on William Wordsworth’s representation of rivers, forming a biased and generalized outlook on Romantic human-river relationships. My discussion of these three female authors seeks to expand current understandings of the Romantic human-river relationship and underscore the important and varying roles of rivers as they are represented in art, rhetoric and, broadly, human culture.
