Encyclopedia Of The Environment In American Literature

This encyclopedia introduces readers to American poetry, fiction and nonfiction with a focus on the environment (broadly defined as humanity’s natural surroundings), from the discovery of America through the present. The work includes biographical and literary entries on material from early explorers and colonists such as Columbus, Bartolomé de Las Casas and Thomas Harriot; Native American creation myths; canonical 18th- and 19th-century works of Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Twain, Dickinson and others; to more recent figures such as Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Stanley Cavell, Rachel Carson, Jon Krakauer and Al Gore. It is meant to provide a synoptic appreciation of how the very concept of the environment has changed over the past five centuries, offering both a general introduction to the topic and a valuable resource for high school and university courses focused on environmental issues.

"Environmental Literature: An Encyclopedia of Works, Authors, and Themes examines the works of explorers, scientists, environmentalists, ecologists, conservationists, and nature writers as well as novelists and poets. Each entry includes end-of-entry references and cross-references to relevant works. A bibliography and comprehensive index round out this handy encyclopedia."--BOOK JACKET.

Susan Clair Imbarrato, Carol Berkin, Brett Barney, Lisa Paddock, Matthew J. Bruccoli, George Parker Anderson, Judith S.

Entries cover environmental issues, scientific terms, agricultural hazards, land use, and legal and social aspects of environmental protection

(Composed of more than 1,100 signed biographical-critical entries, this Encyclopedia serves as both guide and companion to the study and appreciation of American literature. Readers will also discover 70 topical articles covering subjects such as African American literature, feminism, modernism, the South and more.

Welcome to the second edition of the Gale Environmental Encyclopaedia! Almost everything in the world has some environmental significance, be it physical, chemical or the biological world that surrounds us. This giant encyclopaedia not only covers this natural world, but also the 'built' or technological environment as well as the cultural and social context that shapes human lives. Showing central concerns on environment science, it brings out questions like: How did the natural world come to be as it is? How does it work? It attempts to answer them from a variety of different perspective. The articles and definitions given depicts the importance of understanding our environment and our relation to it.

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.