Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays exploring the ways in which art and literature have imagined, animated, and embodied the complex ecology of Philadelphia since the seventeenth century. Essays utilize emerging methods of interpretation in ecocriticism, new materialism, art history, philosophy, and urban studies.
Trade Review“Performing remarkable syntheses of environmental history and recent materialist cultural theory, the essays in A Greene Country Towne confirm Philadelphia’s centrality to the political, commercial, scientific, artistic, and natural history of the United States. A milestone in the multidisciplinary environmental humanities.”
—Michael Ziser,author of Environmental Practice and Early American Literature
“There are moments of wonder and insights scattered throughout, including the English professor Maria Farland’s ecological reading of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the art historian Laura Turner Igoe’s environmental interpretation of the work of Charles Willson Peale.”
—Peter C. Mancall Winterthur Portfolio
Table of ContentsTable of Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Imagining Urban Ecology
Alan C. Braddock and Laura Turner Igoe
Chapter 1: Ink and Paper, Clamshells and Leather: Power, Environmental Perception, and Materiality in the Lenape-European Encounter at Philadelphia
Michael Dean Mackintosh
Chapter 2: “Processes of Nature and Art”: The Ecology of Charles Willson Peale’s Smoke-Eaters and Stoves
Laura Turner Igoe
Chapter 3: Mapping The Quaker City’s Queer Ecology
Mary I. Unger
Chapter 4: Visualizing Urban Nature in Fairmount Park: Economic Diversity, History, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia
Nate Gabriel
Chapter 5: Netted Together: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion at the Dawn of Comparative Biology
John Ott
Chapter 6: Expansive Exhibitions: Agriculture and Environment in Walt Whitman’s Camden-Philadelphia Region
Maria Farland
Chapter 7: “Our yard looks something like a zoological garden”: Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia, and Domestic Animality
Alan C. Braddock
Chapter 8: “A Thorough Study of Causes”: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, and Progressive Era Materiality
Scott Hicks
Chapter 9: Exhibiting Philadelphia’s Vital Center: Negotiating Environmental and Civic Reform in a Popular Postwar Planning Vision
Amy E. Menzer
Chapter 10: “Entertainment for all of the senses”: Stephen Starr’s Experience Dining and the Revitalization of Postindustrial Philadelphia
Stephen Nepa
Chapter 11: “The water flows beneath it still. . .”: Remembering and Re-imagining Philadelphia’s Old Dock Creek
Sue Ann Prince
Chapter 12: Remapping Philadelphia’s Post-Industrial Terrain: A Network in Flux
Andrea Hansen
Notes
Index
