Global Cooperstown: Taxonomy, Biogeography, and Sense of Place in Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours

Abstract

Susan Fenimore Cooper's seasonal nature journal Rural Hours (1850) has gained critical acclaim for its incipient ecological consciousness and has become firmly established in the canon of American environmental literature. Prominent among the values grounding this canon, developed with the consolidation of ecocriticism as a research paradigm over the past two decades, are “various forms of localism, theories and poetics of place and local belonging,” as Ursula Heise puts it in a recent assessment (Heise 384). In this canon, Rural Hours has come to epitomize place-based nature writing. Lawrence Buell, for example, characterizes it as “our first major work of American literary bioregionalism” (Environmental Imagination 406).1 For all its commitment to a particular place, however, Rural Hours refuses to remain in place. Rather, it comprehends the local by developing a globalized sense of place-consciousness. As such, and despite (or sometimes because of) its problematic approach to questions of class and race, Rural Hours bears some of the qualities of the global imagination that ecocriticism is beginning to value, especially an understanding of the mutual shaping of human culture and the natural world. I offer the present essay, then, as an exploration of some possibilities and limitations of the global turn in ecocriticism, directed toward an object text that we have thus far regarded as especially local.2