Looking away: The evasive environmental politics of American literature, 1823--1966

Looking Away: The Evasive Environmental Politics of American Literature combines the history of American environmentalism and the institutional history of American literature studies with theories of periodicity and spatiality to argue that American literature has always been invested in the condition of the North American environment. This environment has been, indeed, a site of political struggle in American letters since the mid-nineteenth century, and I show how the American critical tradition has worked to erase American literature's environmental anxieties since the early twentieth century. Looking Away investigates the environmental commitments of James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; the roles that critics from Margaret Fuller to Van Wyck Brooks, F. O. Matthiessen, and Leslie Fiedler have played in the creation of an environmentally disengaged body of American literature; and the ways that early-twentieth-century authors like Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ernest Hemingway brought the natural world into the new century as a serious site of literary and critical conflict.; Chapter 1 argues that Cooper's Leatherstocking Series, which expresses radical doubt about the permanence and illimitability of North American "nature," marks a significant break from the environmental rhetoric of the colonial and early republican periods. Chapter 2 argues that Cooper's environmental anxieties were eclipsed by the abstract and imperialist vision of nature that Ralph Waldo Emerson defines in Nature, and Chapter 3 explains that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow promoted an environmentally determinist vision of American literature that could have produced a much different relationship between the nation's nature and its literature than the one that in fact developed along more Emersonian lines. Chapter 4 argues that the environmentalist sympathies of both Willa Cather and John Steinbeck were held in check by literary and cultural resistances to any type of environmentalist radicalism. Chapter 5 presents Hurston as an author who steps outside of both cultural and literary expectations by theorizing Florida as a vibrant and organic space ideally suited for African American life, and Chapter 6 presents Hemingway as the author who takes U.S. literature's paradoxical relationship with nature to more absurd lengths than any other.