Encountering Early American Environments

Abstract

The Dividing Line Histories of William Byrd II of Westover Edited by KEVIN JOEL BERLAND Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013 528 pp. American Environmental Fiction, 1782-1847 MATTHEW WYNN SIVILS Surrey: Ashgate, 2014 196 pp. Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and Routes of American Literature CHRISTOPHER P. IANNINI Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012 320 pp. Scanning programs of most recent conferences of Association for Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), (1) early Americanist might find few panels of immediate relevance to her or his research. Aside from a few sessions on early modern nature, eighteenth-century forms, and usual suspects of Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, and Whitman (these authors perhaps stretching definition of early), ASLE's prominent foci have most recently been squarely, and many would say, rightly, on presentist concerns. These include interrogation of concept of anthropocene, exploration of generic and thematic tendencies of CliFi (climate fiction), incorporation of literatures of justice, and enrichment of field's theoretical contributions by defining and exploring such concepts as multispecies ethnography, affective approaches, biosemiotics, and global indigeneity. Indeed, in a time of crisis, and during a historical moment when many of us are witnessing marginalization of humanities in higher education, such a presentist focus is understandable. Ecocriticism--or, to use its more current and inclusive moniker of environmental humanities--proposes methods, subjects, and extrapolations that make humanities relevant to wider public and also to our students, who sense, correctly, that new epistemologies and ontologies will be necessary for survival in broken they have inherited. Moreover, this relevance has made humanistic studies valuable in instrumental ways as well, appealing to deans; practitioners of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; and funding agencies, making our often solitary work more apparently applicable to challenges of ameliorating climate crisis. This presentist focus within has field-specific roots as well: namely, in its internal critical response to romanticized studies of Anglophone, white male-authored that characterized field's formal beginnings in mid-1990s. As Ursula Heise has shown, at time of its emergence, ecocriticism focused mostly on British and American after 1800, especially British Romantic poetry, American nature-writing tradition from Henry David Thoreau to Annie Dillard, and Native American literature (Globality 637). This limited focus was itself a backlash against denaturalizing emphasis of poststructuralist literary criticism that dominated field between late 1960s and early 1990s: responding to notion that was socially constructed, ecocritics sought to ground (pun intended) our literary analyses in solid earth and the actual world (Heise, Hitchhiker's Guide 505). (2) In doing so, they moved their literary analyses to engage more directly with nonhuman world, whether through phenomenological approaches informed by deep ecology or through scientifically inflected approaches such as bioregionalism (Buell 88-92). These approaches yielded a great deal of work focused on nineteenth-century Anglo-American nature writing and poetry, although this focus was more a matter of seizing low-hanging fruit than it was an inherent quality of early itself (Buell 89). As environmentally inflected literary scholars came of age into an defined in part by its resistance to poststructuralist literary theories, they pushed to expand boundaries of ecocritical analysis and to theorize their critical projects more deliberately. …