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This 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 century’s evolving exploration of the interplay between humans and the natural environment.
List of contents
Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Toward an Environmental Ethos
Steven Petersheim and Madison P. Jones IV
The Faces of Nature: The Sublime, the Romantic, and the Real
Navigating the Interior: Edgar Huntly and the Mapping of Early America Christopher Sloman
John D. Godman and the Creation of the Ramble Scott Honeycutt
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
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
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
Always Already Sexual: New Materialism in Whitman's Leaves of GrassStephanie 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
The Swamps of Emily Dickinson
Cecily Parks
The Values of Nature: Caring for the Environment
An Ecological Manifest Destiny: Nature and Nation in Freneau's Poetry Benjamin Darrell Crawford
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
Recovering John Muir's Wild Gardens Carrie Duke
Historical and Literary Context
Guardians or Gardeners
Afterword
Christoph Irmscher
Works Cited
Contributors
About the author
Steven Petersheim is associate professor of American literature at Indiana University East and coeditor of Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature.
Summary
This 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 century’s evolving exploration of the interplay between humans and the natural environment.
