Description
Book SynopsisThis book uncovers the rich variety of environmental writing across the genres in nineteenth-century American literature. The essays in this collection offer a representative sampling of the nineteenth centuryâs evolving exploration of the interplay between humans and the natural environment.
Trade ReviewPublished some 15 years after the groundbreaking Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, ed. by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace—which examined several genres of writing produced over nearly three millennia—the present volume homes in on prose and poetry of the US's long 19th century. During this period, the 11 essayists remind readers, the US was expanding geographically even as it focused back on itself to shape and claim a national identity; these tensions between outward and inward overlapped with tensions between nature and culture. These essays address authors whose struggles with these tensions were overt (Thoreau, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Audubon, Muir), along with authors not generally considered nature writers (Emily Dickinson, Margaret Fuller). One of the refreshing messages that weaves through this collection should not be startling, but is: when writers like Hawthorne and Melville set a character in nature, the landscape should be read as landscape rather than as psychology or symbol. Whereas many analyses of prose suffer from unreadable jargon, these essays—particularly Christopher Sloman’s on Charles Brockden Brown and Li-Ru Lu’s on Audubon—are a pleasure to read. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers * CHOICE *
Table of ContentsScribes of Nature Representing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Acknowledgments Introduction: Toward an Environmental Ethos Steven Petersheim and Madison P. Jones IV The Faces of Nature: The Sublime, the Romantic, and the Real 1.Navigating the Interior: Edgar Huntly and the Mapping of Early America Christopher Sloman 2.John D. Godman and the Creation of the Ramble Scott Honeycutt 3.Celebrating the ‘Great, Round, Solid Self’ of Earth in Hawthorne’s Short Fiction Steven Petersheim Environmental and Cultural Landscapes of New England “The Material and the Moral” in Concord Interpreting Nature from a “Position Between” The Intricacies of Nature: Ecological and Cultural Diversity 4.Learning to Woo Meaning from Apparent Chaos:The Wild Form of Summer on the Lakes Jeffrey Bilbro Selfless Lovers in Chapter Four Milton’s Influence on Fuller’ Search for a Republican Form A Wild Text in Defense of a Wild Place 5.Shadow and Liminal Space in Typee and Walden Madison P. Jones IV Punning on Type in Typee “I have traveled a good deal in Concord”: Walden as Travel Writing 6.Always Already Sexual: New Materialism in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass Stephanie Peebles Tavera External (Natural) Forces: Critical Readings of Sexual Poetics in Whitman The Intra-active Kosmos: Disembodying the Human, Re-inscribing Nature Consummate with Nature: Human-Nonhuman Sexual Intra-activity 7.The Swamps of Emily Dickinson Cecily Parks The Values of Nature: Caring for the Environment 8.An Ecological Manifest Destiny: Nature and Nation in Freneau’s Poetry Benjamin Darrell Crawford 9.John James Audubon: From Proto-Ecological Sensibility to Conservation Ethics Li-Ru Lu The Roots of Audubon’s Proto-Ecological Sensibility The Development of Audubon’s Environmental Ethics Constructing a Conservationist Identity 10.Recovering John Muir’s Wild Gardens Carrie Duke Historical and Literary Context Guardians or Gardeners Afterword Christoph Irmscher Works Cited Contributors
