Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature

About this book

The nineteenth-century roots of environmental writing in American literature are often mentioned in passing and sometimes studied piece by piece. Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature brings together numerous explorations of environmentally-aware writing across the genres of nineteenth-century literature. Like Lawrence Buell, the authors of this collection find Thoreau's writing a touchstone of nineteenth-century environmental writing, particularly focusing on Thoreau's claim that humans may function as "scribes of nature". However, these studies of Thoreau's antecedents, contemporaries, and successors also reveal a range of other writers in the nineteenth century whose literary treatments of nature are often more environmentally attuned than most readers have noticed.

The writers whose works are studied in this collection include canonical and forgotten writers, men and women, early nineteenth-century and late nineteenth-century authors, pioneers and conservationists. They drew attention to the conflicted relationships between humans and the American continent, as experienced by Native Americans and European Americans. Taken together, these essays offer a fresh perspective on the roots of environmental literature in nineteenth-century American nonfiction, fiction, and poetry as well as in multi-genre compositions such as the travel writings of Margaret Fuller. Bringing largely forgotten voices such as John Godman alongside canonical voices such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, the authors whose writings are studied in this collection produced a diverse tapestry of nascent American environmental writing in the nineteenth-century. From early nineteenth-century writers such as poet Philip Freneau and novelist Charles Brockden Brown to later nineteenth-century conservationists such as John James Audubon and John Muir, Scribes of Nature shows the development of an environmental consciousness and a growing conservationist ethos in American literature.

Given their often surprisingly healthy respect for the natural environment, these nineteenth-century writers offer us much to consider in an age of environmental crisis. The complexities of the supposed nature/culture divide still work into our lives today as economic and environmental issues are often seen at loggerheads when they ought to be seen as part of the same conversation of what it means to live healthy lives, and to pass on a healthy world to those who follow us in a world where human activity is becoming increasingly threatening to the health of our planet.

Contents

Scribes 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

Customer Reviews

Biography

Steven Petersheim is assistant professor of English at Indiana University East. Madison P. Jones IV is founder and editor-in-chief of Kudzu House Quarterly, a literary and scholarly journal devoted to ecological thought.