Table Of ContentEDITED BY DAVID MAZEL
A
Century
of
Early
Ecocriticism
The University of Georgia Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A century of early ecocriticism / edited by David Mazel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 0-8203-2221-0 (alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8203-2222-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. American literature—History and criticism.
2. Nature in literature. 3. Conservation of natural resources
in literature. 4. Environmental protection in literature.
5. Philosophy of nature in literature. 6. Forests and forestry
in literature. 7. Wilderness areas in literature.
8. Outdoor life in literature. 9. Landscape in literature.
10. Ecology in literature, I. Mazel, David.
PS163 .C46 2001
8io.9'35$—dc2i
00030216
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
AT"* 4 S'*; °[
This book is dedicated to my students.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction i
Henry Tuckerman on John and William Bartram (1864) 20
James Russell Lowell on Henry David Thoreau (1865) 26
John Burroughs on Walt Whitman, Gilbert White, and Henry David
Thoreau (1867,1902, and 1919) 33
William Benjamin Carpenter on Sciences Representation
of Nature (1872) 48
Alfred Austin on the Poetic Interpretation of Nature (1877) 53
Richard Jefferies on the Shortcomings of Language (1887) 70
Hamilton Wright Mabie on Hebrew Poetry, John Burroughs, and
Natures Record in Language (1891 and 1897) 78
Selden Whitcomb on Nature in Early American Literature (1893) ^7
Mary Woolley on the Love of Romantic Scenery in America (1897) 101
Exchanges from the “Nature Faker” Controversy (1902-1907) 113
Charles G. D. Roberts on the Evolution of the Animal Story (1902) 148
Mabel Osgood Wright on Nature, Gender, Outdoor Life,
and Fiction (1903 and 1905) 154
Fannie Eckstorm on Thoreau s The Maine Woods (1908) 163
Havelock Ellis on the Psychological Roots of the
Love of Wilderness (1909) 173
viii CONTENTS
Dallas Lore Sharp on Sincerity in Nature Writing (1911) 195
Norman Foerster on Nature Cultists and American Literature
(1912 and 1923) 208
Aldo Leopold on Forestry and the Hebrew Bible (1920) 228
D. H. Lawrence on Hector St. Jean de Crfcvecoeur (1923) 237
Lewis Mumford on Thoreau, Nature, and Society (1926) 249
Henry Chester Tracy on Women Nature Writers (1930) 257
Mar>' Hunter Austin on Literature and the Regional Environment
(1932) 261
Mark Van Doren on Donald Culross Peattie (1937) 272
Donald Culross Peattie on Thoreau, Science, and Nature (1938) 278
F. O. Matthiessen on the Organic Style of Emerson
and Thoreau (1941) 283
D. S. Savage on Nature and Immediacy in Poetry (1942) 294
Joseph Wood Krutch on the Intellectual History
of Nature Writing (1950) 302
Perry Miller on Nature and American Nationalism (1955) 314
Sherman Paul on Thoreau, The Maine Woods, and the Problem
of Ktaadn (1958) 329
Leo Marx on the Pastoral in American Literature (1964) 341
Sources of Selections 353
Annotated Bibliography of Early Ecocriticism 355
Index 365
Acknowledgments
Many people helped make this book possible. I would like especially to
thank David Taylor, Roy Underwood, and the Division of Arts and Letters
at the University of West Alabama; Gregor Smith and the Julia Tutwiler
Library; John Frazee, Joseph Kolupke, and the School of Arts and Letters
at Adams State College; Phil Jones and Adams State College's Neilsen Li
brary; and my friends and colleagues SueEllen Campbell, Cheryll Glot-
felty, Stephen and Cindy Slimp, Phyllis Ann Thompson, Christopher Healy,
and Barbara Griego. Particular thanks go to Irene Marquez and Heather
Goodstein Milton, who transcribed the bulk of this books text, and to Amy
Bauer and the servers at Alamosa’s legendary Campus Cafe.
A
Century
of
Early
Ecocriticism
Introduction
That which was unconscious truth, becomes, when
interpreted and defined in an object, a part of the domain
of knowledge,—a new weapon in the magazine of power.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
Ecocriticism—the study of literature as if the environment mattered—has
only recently come to recognize itself as a distinct critical enterprise. The
term itself apparently dates no further back than 1978, when it was coined by
William Rueckert.1 Of course, in such a rapidly changing field as literary
studies, 1978 can seem like a long time ago, and a twenty-year history can
confer a quite respectable pedigree. This is the sense I got when Cheryll
Glotfelty wrote, in The Ecocriticism Reader (1996), that “individual literary
and cultural scholars have been developing ecolQgicalLv^nfoiJDjecLcrijLi-
cism and theory since the seventies" and that therefore the “origin of eco
criticism . . . predates its recent consolidation by more than twenty years."2
It was as if those twenty years lent the field the sort of legitimacy The Eco
criticism Reader itself has done so much to establish.
Many of us have suspected, however, that ecocriticism actually boasts a
much longer history. After all, the environment has mattered to Americans,
in many of the same ways it matters today, for more than a century. Surely
among the nations numerous early environmentalists there must have been
an occasional literary critic whose concern for nature was reflected in an
occasional essay or book. Nature writing itself is even older—more than two
centuries old, if we date it from the 1789 publication of Gilbert White’s Natu
re*/ History of Selbome—and surely it must have come now and then to the
attention of a literary critic and prompted a de facto ecocriticism.
Just as nature writing and environmentalism predate Earth Day, so must a
kind of ecocriticism predate the essays of Glen Love, William Rueckert,
2 A CENTURY OF EARLY ECOCRITICISM
Joseph Meeker, and Lynn White Jr. In searching for such work, and in decid
ing whether to include it in this collection, I quickly realized that I would
need a working definition. Just what is ecocriticism? I have already offered
one formulation above, but there are others. In The Ecocriticism Reader; for
example, Glotfelty defines it as “the study of the relationship between litera-
ture and the physical environment.” In much the same way that “feminist
criticism examines language and literature from a gender-conscious perspec
tive,” she continues, “and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of
production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an
earth-centered approach to literary studies.” No matter how it is defined,
ecocriticism seems less a singular approach or method than a constellation
of approaches, having little more in common than a shared concern with the
environment. It can address itself to a wide range of questions, including but
hardly limited to these: “How is nature represented in this sonnet? What role
does the physical setting play in the plot of this novel? Are the values ex
pressed in the play consistent with ecological wisdom? ... How has the con
cept of wilderness changed over time?”5
Clearly, a broad range of work may legitimately be thought of as ecocriti
cism. In compiling this anthology I have thus tried to be as inclusive as pos
sible, counting as “ecocriticism” any material that might be of special inter
est not only to scholars but to all who share a love for both literature and the
environment. I have not limited the collection to professional, peer-reviewed
academic writing, nor even to “the best that has been thought and said” on
the matter. As Glotfelty notes, ecocriticism necessarily encompasses both a
“broad scope of inquiry and disparate levels of sophistication,”4 and too fussy
a definition would have excluded much of interest. The bottom line was that
I’d rather have readers find this collection useful and interesting than defin-
itionally pristine. The result, as I hope readers will discover, is a varied an
thology of works that are well written, highly original, and full of provocative,
strikingly relevant ideas about literature and the natural environment.
Should it be alleged that I have adopted such an expansive definition in
order to appropriate as much work as possible as “early ecocriticism,” I can
only plead guilty. In addition to making early ecocritical work available to
contemporary scholars, I am also attempting to create for ecocriticism a his
tory, a tradition, where thus far there has been none. Even in a culture such
as ours, which fetishizes the new, a sense of tradition can still confer legiti
macy and power; it can still function as what Van Wyck Brooks perceptively
Introduction 3
termed “a usable past.” I want this anthology to begin constructing just such
a past for the field of literature and environment
I searched for early ecocriticism in two broad categories. It seemed reason
able to look first for instances in which professional or academic critics had
written specifically about nature writing, or at least about the green aspects
of works in todays environmental-literature canon. It also made sense to seek
critical work by nature writers—instances where nature writers took time out
"from writing about nature in order to write about writing. As it turned out,
many of this collections de facto ecocritics fit both of these categories—
Joseph Wood Krutch, for example, excelled as both nature writer and profes
sional critic—while others, such as D. H. Lawrence, seem to belong in
neither.
Prior to the emergence of environmental literary studies as an academic
field in the late 1980s, there was no discourse of ecocriticism per se. What
ecocriticism there was necessarily appeared elsewhere, typically as part of
the more general discourses of nature writing, scholarship and criticism, and
environmentalism. Unlike today's ecocriticism, which seems so clearly an
offshoot of the environmental awareness of the 1960s and 1970s, the early
ecocriticism of this collection seems to have been prompted only indirectly
by environmentalism itself. In the United States, at least, it was much more
directly a response to two separate developments. Outside the colleges and
universities, ecocriticism appeared in response to the burgeoning popularity
of nature writing; within the academy, it arose largely out of what might be
termed disciplinary politics, a by-product of the emergence of American lit
erature as an academic discipline.
In the United States a recognizable ecocriticism first arose in the latter
half of the nineteenth century, as criticism in general was beginning to un
dergo two major changes. Academic criticism at the time was dominated by
“men of letters,” genteel critics such as Harvard's James Russell Lowell—
writers who were broadly “cultured” rather than narrowly specialized. Their
work, like that of their nonacademic but equally genteel counterparts, ap
peared in a small cluster of highbrow magazines, most notably the Atlantic.
The dominant mode of criticism was a Matthew Arnold-style humanism,
and Boston was its geographical center. Toward the end of the century, how
ever, fundamental demographic and economic changes tilted the balance of
cultural power away from an increasingly provincial Boston—which had
given us writers such as Emerson and Thoreau in addition to such critics as
