| American environmental literature has traditionally been understood in terms of the pastoral mode. As a result, most scholarship has focused on the natural environment's role as an occasion for deliberative retreat rather than as a vital subject and agent of American literary culture. Continent Ajar seeks to remedy this neglect of the material and experiential facts of the natural world through consideration of the large body of alternative environmental writing, dating from the first European settlements to the Civil War, that records the encumbered imagination's engagement with the natural world. These georgic works, which describe the slow mutual accommodation of settler to settled land, form a little-studied archive of exploration reports, agricultural manuals, rural almanacs, scientific treatises, economic tracts, poems, and novels. Arising out of and producing specific environmental practices---how to tend a tuber or cure a leaf, where to transplant fruit trees or find a beehive---these writings bespeak a continuity between language and the natural environment that stands in sharp contrast to the pastoral's stance of speculative detachment. Drawing on environmental non-fiction, fiction, and poetry as well as a wide array of contemporary ecocritical, philosophical, linguistic, and scientific works, Continent Ajar argues for the widespread influence of the georgic in American literature and develops a georgic critical practice to stand alongside the extensive pastoral tradition in American nature writing and criticism. After an introductory chapter, Continent Ajar proceeds through a series of four case studies selected for temporal spread (late sixteenth through mid nineteenth centuries), geographical range (the Atlantic trade circuit, Virginia, New England, and the Michigan territory), distinct environmental orientations (eating potatoes, smoking tobacco, grafting apple trees, and hunting bees), and diverse epistemologies (scientific, political, religious, and aesthetic). Major writers treated include Thomas Hariot, Francis Bacon, King James I, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Henry David Thoreau, and James Fenimore Cooper. |
