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American Environmental Fiction, 1782-1847
Contributor(s): Sivils, Matthew Wynn (Author)

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 ISBN: 1409431630     ISBN-13: 9781409431633
Publisher: Routledge
OUR PRICE: $109.25  

Binding Type: Hardcover - See All Available Formats & Editions
Published: August 2014
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Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Comparative Literature
- Science | Environmental Science (see Also Chemistry - Environmental)
- Literary Criticism | American - General
Dewey: 810.9
LCCN: 2014006147
Physical Information: 0.5" H x 6.14" W x 9.21" L (1.01 lbs) 196 pages
Features: Bibliography, Index
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
While Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are often credited with inventing American environmental writing, Matthew Wynn Sivils argues that the works of these Transcendentalists must be placed within a larger literary tradition that has its origins in early Republic natural histories, Indian captivity narratives, Gothic novels, and juvenile literature. Authors such as William Bartram, Ann Eliza Bleecker, and Samuel Griswold Goodrich, to name just a few, enabled the development of a credibly American brand of proto-environmental fiction. Sivils argues that these seeds of environmental literature would come to fruition in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, which he argues is the first uniquely environmental American novel. He then connects the biogeographical politics of Cooper's The Prairie with European anti-Americanism; and concludes this study by examining how James Kirke Paulding, Thomas Cole, and James Fenimore Cooper imaginatively addressed the problem of human culpability and nationalistic cohesiveness in the face of natural disasters. With their focus on the character and implications of the imagined American landscape, these key works of early environmental thought contributed to the growing influence of the natural environment on the identity of the fledgling nation decades before the influences of Emerson's Nature and Thoreau's Walden.
 
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