Description
Book SynopsisChristian Knoeller presents a radical reinterpretation of environmental history set in the heartland of America. In an excellent model of narrative-based scholarship, this book dynamically reimagines American environmentalism across generations of writers, artists, and scientists. Knoeller starts out with Audubon, and cites Thoreau’s journals in the 1850s as he assesses an early 17th century account of New England’s natural resources by William Wood, showing the epic decline in game and bird populations in Concord. This reading of environmental history is replicated throughout with a gallery of novelists, poets, essayists, and other commentators as they explore ecological memory and environmental destruction. In apt discussions of Matthiessen, Lopez, Wendell Berry, William Stafford and many others, Knoeller offers vibrant insights into literary history. He also cites his own memoir of perpetual development on his family’s farm in Indiana, enriching the scholarship and making an urgent plea for the healing aesthetics of the imagination.
Reading across centuries and genres, Knoeller gives us a vibrant new appraisal of Midwestern/North American interior literary traditions and makes clear how vital environmental writing is to this region. To date, no one has written such an eloquent and comprehensive cross-genre analysis of Midwestern environmental literature.
Trade ReviewReimagining Environmental History provides a chronological and cross genre analysis of the environmental history of the Midwest. Knoeller provides a fresh and compelling perspective on many landscapes of the Midwest that include the Ohio River Valley, the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and lands of the Great Lakes, to stretches of tallgrass prairie and the High Plains of North America. The book is well-supported through careful reading of primary texts and parsing of secondary literature."" - Susan Naramore Maher, author of
Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains""Knoeller’s book is an important addition to ongoing scholarship on environmental history in literature, eco criticism, and the intersection of landscape and imaginative vision in literature. It is extremely well written in a voice that will reach scholarly communities and the general public pursuing insights and solutions to dealing with climate change. The research is meticulously careful and thorough. The approach is a close reading of texts leading to new insights on literary history, an urgent plea for the healing aesthetics of the imagination, and an exquisitely clear memoir on the author’s experiences which enrich the scholarship."" - Ronald Primeau, author of
Herbert Woodward Martin and the African American Tradition in Poetry
