'Toward the western sea': Science, culture, and narrative in the American Pacific

'Toward the Western Sea" examines the rise and evolution of the literature of the American Pacific from 1840 through 1950. The particularities of the coastal environment and the communities that form along and within the Pacific Rim helped define a major western U.S. literary tradition, intermingling science, aesthetics, and social theory. These representations of human communities and environmental isolation continue to influence 20 th- and 21st-century U.S. literature. I examine the work of five seminal writers who engage with contemporary scientific and cultural discourses to interpret the conditions of communal interdependence and social isolation as both human and environmental phenomena. Richard Henry Dana, Jr. viewed the Pacific and California as a frontier that held both degenerative and regenerative possibilities for individuals and the nation, and his narrative envisions the region as a site of personal and communal discovery. Herman Melville found potent metaphor in the insularity of island life for his critique of the isolating impact of capitalism on individuals and communities both in the Pacific and at home in the U.S., and the ultimate failure of democracy. The writing Jack London produced in and about the Pacific captures the ideological dialectic that he struggled with throughout much of his life---between the individual and the collective---and is elucidated especially in his consideration of disease and medical science in those texts. Robinson Jeffers's narrative poems of the 1920s are the foundation of his philosophy of Inhumanism, a holistic paradigm conceived of the poet's rhizomatic thinking about astronomy and principles of California geology, set against the backdrop of the Pacific. Finally, John Steinbeck's ecological explorations of Monterey and the Gulf of California are identified as the foundation of mid 20th-century literary conceptions of the Pacific Rim region as a macroecosystem.