American Environmental Fiction 1782 1847

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.

In his study of captivity narratives, Kyhl Lyndgaard argues that these accounts have influenced land-use policy and environmental attitudes at the same time that they reveal the complex relationship between ethnicity, landscape, and authorship. In connecting these themes, Lyndgaard offers readers an alternative environmental literature, one that is dependent on an understanding of nature as home rather than as a place of temporary retreat. He examines three captivity narratives written in the 1820s and 1830s - A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, The Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner, and Life of Black Hawk -all of which engage with the Jacksonian policy of Indian removal and resist tropes of the so-called Vanishing Indian. As Lyndgaard shows, the authors and the editors with whom they collaborated often saw their stories as a plea for environmental and social justice. At the same time, audiences have embraced them for their vision of a more inclusive and less exploitative American society than was proffered by the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny. Their legacy is that while environmental and social justice has been slow in fulfilment, their continued popularity testifies to the fact that the struggle for justice has never been ceded.

This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America‘s most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.

First Published in 2017. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Introduction -- PART I: Travelling Subjects and Transitive Identities -- 1 Reformation in Mansfield Park : The Slave Trade and the Stillpoint of Knowledge -- 2 "That Dreadful, Delightful City": Edgar Allan Poe's Essaying of London -- 3 "Humble Auxiliaries to Nature": Go-Betweens and Natural Knowledge in Crèvecoeur's Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York -- 4 Writing Pocahontas: Romantic Women Writers and the Transatlantic Rescuing Indian Maiden -- PART II: Ancient Decline and Nineteenth-Century Moralities -- 5 Women of Colour, Politics and the Plague in Lydia Maria Child's Philothea: A Grecian Romance -- 6 Christian Morality and Roman Depravity: Illustrating Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii in a Transatlantic Literary Market -- PART III: Transatlantic Print Culture and Transitive Texts -- 7 Virtual Museums in Early America: Transatlantic Magazine Culture and Cultural Memory -- 8 Cultural Transfer in the German Atlantic: Brown, Oertel, and the First Translation of a U.S. Novel -- 9 William Blake's American Afterlives: Transatlantic Poetics in Emerson and Whitman -- 10 American Notes and English Guidebooks: (Re)writing English Literature in Melville and Dickens -- List of Contributors -- Index

This book examines ‘Southern Gothic’ - a term that describes some of the finest works of the American Imagination. But what do ‘Southern’ and ‘Gothic’ mean, and how are they related? Traditionally seen as drawing on the tragedy of slavery and loss, ‘Southern Gothic’ is now a richer, more complex subject. Thirty-five distinguished scholars explore the Southern Gothic, under the categories of Poe and his Legacy; Space and Place; Race; Gender and Sexuality; and Monsters and Voodoo. The essays examine slavery and the laws that supported it, and stories of slaves who rebelled and those who escaped. Also present are the often-neglected issues of the Native American presence in the South, socioeconomic class, the distinctions among the several regions of the South, same-sex relationships, and norms of gendered behaviour. This handbook covers not only iconic figures of Southern literature but also other less well-known writers, and examines gothic imagery in film and in contemporary television programmes such as True Blood and True Detective.

Winner, Outstanding Academic Title 2017, Choice Magazine The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic shift in the display and dissemination of natural knowledge across Britain and America, from private collections of miscellaneous artifacts and objects to public exhibitions and state-sponsored museums. The science museum as we know it—an institution of expert knowledge built to inform a lay public—was still very much in formation during this dynamic period. Science Museums in Transition provides a nuanced, comparative study of the diverse places and spaces in which science was displayed at a time when science and spectacle were still deeply intertwined; when leading naturalists, curators, and popular showmen were debating both how to display their knowledge and how and whether they should profit from scientific work; and when ideals of nationalism, class politics, and democracy were permeating the museum’s walls. Contributors examine a constellation of people, spaces, display practices, experiences, and politics that worked not only to define the museum, but to shape public science and scientific knowledge. Taken together, the chapters in this volume span the Atlantic, exploring private and public museums, short and long-term exhibitions, and museums built for entertainment, education, and research, and in turn raise a host of important questions, about expertise, and about who speaks for nature and for history.

From catastrophe to utopia, the most comprehensive survey yet of how literature can speak to the 'Anthropocene'.