The contemporary discourse of environmentalism is held back by its use of problematic concepts such as "nature" and "environment" that indicate a pervasive biophobia within modernity. Biophobia: Anxiety, Wildness, and the Horror of Nature presents a conception of "wildness" designed to extend the critique of "nature" in recent ecocritical theory, including most relevantly the work of Timothy Morton and Dana Phillips. I argue that "nature" and "environment" exhibit and facilitate a repression of human anxiety about being a body in a world that exceeds our attempts to master it. They serve to alleviate biophobia through repressing the wildness of life by establishing stable boundaries for thought and action. The dissertation examines the literary production of British and American Romanticism to show how our current understanding of these concepts emerged out of a privileging of Wordsworthian nature. I argue that, against Wordsworth's biophobic domestication of wildness, P. B.

Shelley's poetics of love and mutability, as well as elements of the gothic tradition exemplified by Radcliffe and Poe and the apocalyptic tradition arising out of Byron's "Darkness" and Mary Shelley's The Last Man, offer valuable aesthetic tools for overcoming biophobia and embracing the vitality of matter. I view the tradition of the sublime as an aesthetic containment of wildness, arguing that horror as an aesthetic mode is better suited to figuring it. As a result, I discuss contemporary environmental horror film, such as The Last Winter, Grizzly Man, Melancholia, and Antichrist , as expressing symptoms of biophobia and as a genre worth taking seriously as a means of promoting ecological thought. The dissertation situates these arguments in relation to ecocriticism, affect studies, and new materialism and draws on the theoretical writings of Derrida, Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy, Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, Alenka Zupancic, Jane Bennett, and Thomas Weiskel.

Its key contribution is to promote ecocritical appreciation of the work of P. B. Shelley and the gothic, while recuperating the critical assessment of environmental horror in order to unlock its potential for understanding contemporary attitudes toward ecological complexity.