Review of Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature. Edited by Steven Petersheim and Madison P. Jones IV.

Authors

Matthew Guzman, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

2016

Citation

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2016), pp. 1–2 doi:10.1093/isle/isw056

Comments

Copyright (c) 2016 Matthew Guzman. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment.

Abstract

As editors Steven Petersheim and Madison Jones acknowledge in their Introduction, the field of ecocriticism owes much to the work of scholars such as Lawrence Buell, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Leo Marx. Petersheim and Jones’s intention for Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature is to extend the conversation about American writers of nature in a similar vein as Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace’s Beyond Nature Writing (2001). One would expect names such as Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Melville to be included in a conversation about nineteenth-century American “nature” or “environmental” writing. Although these canonical names do indeed crop up throughout the essays in this collection, they do not monopolize the conversation. Thus, in addition to the expected nature writer canon, one encounters a number of less discussed “scribes of nature.”