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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
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
About the author
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.
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.
