Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History

This book discusses how literary writers re-envisioned species survival and racial uplift through ecological concepts of dispersal.

Juliana Chow (Author)

9781108845717, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 November 2021

290 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.1 cm, 0.51 kg

'Recommended.' T. Bonner Jr, Choice

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History illuminates how literary experimentation with natural history provides penumbral views of environmental survival. The book brings together feminist revisions of scientific objectivity and critical race theory on diaspora to show how biogeography influenced material and metaphorical concepts of species and race. It also highlights how lesser known writers of color like Simon Pokagon and James McCune Smith connected species migration and mutability to forms of racial uplift. The book situates these literary visions of environmental fragility and survival amidst the development of Darwinian theories of evolution and against a westward expanding American settler colonialism.

Introduction. Diminishment: Partial Readings in the Casualties of Natural History
1. Sketching American Species: Birds, Weeds, and Trees in Audubon, Cooper, and Pokagon
2. “Because I see – New Englandly – ”: Emily Dickinson and the Specificity of Disjunction
3. Coral of Life: James McCune Smith and the Diasporic Structure of Racial Uplift
4. Thoreau's Dispersion: Writing a Natural History of Casualties.

Subject Areas: The Earth: natural history general [WNW], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]