Projecting Early American Environmental Writing

Abstract

“Nature” has long been an organizing category in American studies, often figured abstractly as wilderness, frontier, or garden. While continuing to engage with such ideologically saturated landscapes, ecocriticism and allied historicist approaches turned in the wake of poststructuralism toward the materiality of “nature,” both human and nonhuman, and toward the referential as well as the constitutive claims of texts. These developments transformed the category of “nature” into “environment” while interrogating the subject/object dualism built into “environment” (that which environs). The resulting paradigm offers three models for projecting the concerns of early American environmental writing into later periods. A contrastive model emphasizes discontinuity, locating the work of Thoreau at a key moment in environmental history to mark a divide between “green” and pre-“green” ideologies. An early American origins model emphasizes continuity by tracing textual and environmental histories from colonial sources. Subject to some of the familiar critiques of origins models of American literary history and culture from Frederick Jackson Turner through Sacvan Bercovitch, an environmentally inflected origins model nevertheless retains heuristic value in diagnosing present concerns, such as Americans’ general preoccupation with economic growth. Finally, however, all environmental writing carries a biogeographical frame that transcends the nationalist organization of both the contrastive and origins models. Biogeography reconciles the national or transnational locations of particular texts with universal concerns such as place-consciousness, literary form, and the organization of the nature-culture collective, while revealing the nostalgia inherent in any appeal to a pure state of nature untouched by humankind.