Humans being in the environment: American philosophy of the environment and nineteenth century literature

In the 1960's, the modern environmental movement was born. Forty years have passed, and we find ourselves in the midst of an environmental crisis of global proportions. The purpose of this paper is to examine humankind's place within the non-human environment in conjunction with an earlier environmental movement of the 19th century and the literature of that time period. In Part I of this paper, I will explore historic philosophical views of the environment with emphasis on the American frontier experience and the resulting paradigm shift of the last half of nineteenth century thought and literary works. I will also briefly discuss the ecocriticism movement in literary studies before I apply this type of critical analysis in Part II to two American authors of the late nineteenth century: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sarah Orne Jewett.