Placing the Frontier in Early American Literature (original) (raw)
Concepts of Preservation of Wilderness and Cooper's Deerslayer
Shrinkhala, 2014
Modern times have recognized the need for wilderness even as it is perceived to be under increasing threat from the forces of development. In this background the wilderness novels of James Fenimore Cooper assume greater relevance even if they were written in the nineteenth century and hark back to an even earlier time –the conquest of the American continent by the Europeans and the negative consequences of the colonization on the virgin forests and the land.
2019
One thing that I learned throughout my time in graduate school is that no project, conference paper, article, or book chapter is a solitary endeavor. This dissertation is no exception to this universal truth of the academy. However, all faults remaining in this manuscript, as well as all other work published at present, are my own but I blame Ian J. Jesse. Chief among those who assisted me through the journey of graduate school are my co-advisers Richard Judd and Liam Riordan. Liam is to blame for inspiring a bright-eyed, non-traditional undergraduate student sitting in his U.S. History I survey class to say, "that's what I want to be when I grow up." Through many conversations in his office, he led me down the path of academic redemption and finally an acceptance into graduate school. My budding interest in the era of the American Revolution was then nurtured and grown in both his undergraduate and graduate seminars concerning the topic. Dick sparked my interest in environmental history as a graduate student while Liam, who was then my M.A. adviser, was in Scotland on a Fulbright Fellowship. Dick is to blame for giving a very naïve and very hungry graduate student the advice of becoming an academic entrepreneur by diversifying my credentials as much as possible. By the time he taught me to say "no" regarding digital and public history projects, academic service work, and service to the department, Pandora's box was already opened never to be closed again. Wedding Dick's interest in environmental history and Liam's interest in the American Revolution with my interest of both, we came up with a co-advising relationship that led to the two of them reading vii Cole, began to value and romanticize the wilderness in the mid-nineteenth century. 4 However, this dissertation argues that the simplistic historical progression of wilderness perception from fear, to utility, to romance, and then to conservation and preservation makes Euro-Americans complex relationship to nature in the Northeastern Borderlands too linear and unidirectional. By analyzing the written documentation left by soldiers during the American Revolution, this dissertation unearths a complex relationship between eighteenth-century individuals, almost all of them European or American-born men, and the natural world that transcended lines of class and urbanrural residence. Whether a soldier was an artisanal wig maker from Providence, Rhode Island, a farmer from Sherman Valley, Pennsylvania, or a merchant from New Haven, Connecticut, he simultaneously felt, in the face of wilderness travel, competing emotions of trepidation, awe, failure, invigoration, and accomplishment. 5 Lateeighteenth century understandings of the wilderness existed in multiple planes of awareness with both positive and negative connotations. As the British and Continental armies navigated the northeastern wilderness, their senses of fear, utility, and appreciation shaped their interactions with local indigenous, French, and provincial populations who resided within the bioregion of the Northeastern Borderlands. The way in which local people perceived, assisted, and 4 For more on the progressive continuum of American understanding of nature see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 5 The soldiers referenced are Captain Simeon Thayer, Private George Morison, and Colonel Benedict Arnold. For more information on these individuals and other diarist during the Invasion of Canada in 1775, see Appendix A. population of this large region allowed those living within it to exercise autonomy and sovereignty with varying degrees of success over time. Ecologically, the region is bound by mountainous terrain and rich alluvial soils where residents wrested a variety of grains from their fields and fruit from their orchards. The region is well-watered receiving approximately 42 inches of rainfall annually, and intersected with riparian passages inland from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of St. Lawrence. Large tracts of uncolonized space lay between Euro-American settlements and fortifications with no, or only rudimentary, colonial communications and infrastructure linking them. Located in Between: A History of War and Environment Studies The union of war and environment studies has emerged from an insightful article published in the Environmental History Review in 1995 entitled, "The Impact of World War II on the Land." 13 Author, Ferenc Szasz, argued that despite the devastation wrought by the war on the built environment, human culture, and human society, military historians had claimed "that even the cataclysmic events of 1939-1945 involved no permanent alteration to the natural environment" as battlefields returned to farmland and postwar urban landscapes bustled with renewed activity. 14 This traditional view did not take into account the use of chemical weapons, biological weapons, and radioactive weapons by both the Axis and the Allies, which Szasz argued "did alter the natural environment at a number of locations," including manufacturing 13 Ferenc M.
An Analysis of Frederick Jackson Turner's " The Significance of the Frontier in American History "
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The 'Feral' Wilderness: American Studies, Ecoliterature and the Disclosures of American Space
American Studies in Scandinavia, 2010
This essay argues for a broader historical and geographical context for reading American environmental literature. Many works of American nature writing, or "ecoliteralure," contain important critiques, explicit or implicit, of resource capitalism and the course of American urbanization, hut this aspect is often overlooked by scholars. The undervaluing of these texts as environmental critiques is the result of developme/lfs in critical theory since the 1950s. The problem began with readings undertaken. by myth-symbol scholars, in particular Leo Marx, and was intensified by the rise of new historicist crilicism in the 1970s. Ecocriticsm's ''.frrst 1vave" operated largely within its own context, and while "second wave " ecocriticism has effectively defended pastoral writing, scholars have generally conceded too much ground to new historicist critiques, and overemphasized "narurism " at the expense of the wcial construction. of space. "Feral wilderness" is a re-concep/11alizatio11 of American space, with resonance in the works of Thoreau and Edward Abbey, that grounds narurism in. a 111aterialis1 underslandin.g of American geographic development.