The American artist N. C. Wyeth’s 1942 painting (see ), Walden Pond Revisited, presents Henry David Thoreau in what this book calls his landscape of genius. Thoreau faces us directly in the center of the composition with his gaze slightly averted, creating an intense, one-to-one relationship with the viewer, analogous to the relationship between author and solitary reader. Thoreau’s central presence defines the landscape behind him, including the various emblems of his authorship – his boat, his beanfield, and above all his pondside house. Bands of light radiate through the landscape, signifying its spiritual energies and associating Thoreau with his house and pond, the surrounding nature, and the heavens. The entire Walden landscape is defined by the painting in these ways as a shrine around Thoreau’s authorial genius. Yet this is also simultaneously a natural landscape, with a thick layer of forest protecting the inner shrine of the pond from the more modern railway and town. Thoreau stands in the middle of that landscape as if himself a part of nature: harmonized with his surroundings in greenish-brown clothes, his head swathed in a halo of green and his legs planted in a thick brown trunk into the ground like a kind of human tree. At the same time, his dress is elaborate and slightly formal, mirroring the high-cultural aesthetic tastefulness of the landscape behind him. Thoreau’s central presence in these ways both defines and merges into the Walden landscape, mediating viewers’ connection through that landscape to the transcendent spiritual and aesthetic power of nature. Authorial genius, nature, and high culture blend seamlessly into one another.

Wyeth’s painting exemplifies how certain natural landscapes became strongly associated with authors and their genius during the long nineteenth century in both Great Britain and the United States. William Wordsworth’s English Lake District, Thoreau’s Walden Pond, and John Muir’s Yosemite emerged as especially paradigmatic and influential landscapes in this way. Such landscapes conflated nature and genius, associating nature with new, middle-class versions of the fine arts and national high culture. Landscapes of genius taught people to experience nature through much the same forms of imaginative activity that were being applied to works of literature, music, and the visual arts in the newly emerging national canons. Such landscapes established shrines of authorial identity, nature, and nationalism. These transatlantic landscapes of genius redefined the nineteenth-century significance of “nature,” produced the new institution of the National Park, and gave birth to a modern environmental movement.

Landscapes of genius shared certain defining properties, as portrayed in Wyeth’s painting. Authors and their works were often figured as consubstantial with the landscape, mediating in this liminal role between human culture and nature. Readers, viewers, travelers, and literary pilgrims then sought to experience those landscapes as if through the eyes and consciousness of their mediating authors, in order to share in the genius of those authors and connect through that genius with the spiritual power of the landscape and of nature in general. At the same time, those writers and landscapes also became strongly associated with the nation, as Wordsworth’s Lake District came to be viewed as fundamentally English and Thoreau’s Walden and Muir’s Yosemite as fundamentally American. Identification with authors through their landscapes of genius in this way supported an autonomous version of individual identity while at the same time incorporating individuals into the shared imagined community of the nation, thus helping to construct a new liberal democratic social order. Landscapes of genius naturalized this distinctively modern social order, becoming important sites of memory (Reference Nora and KritzmanNora and Kritzman) for the formation of nineteenth-century cultural nationalism. The first public political campaigns for environmental preservation then focused on defending such landscapes as a form of national high culture in ways that fundamentally shaped the social identity, priorities, and rhetoric of a nascent environmental movement. The English Lake District and Yosemite, with their authorial associations, emerged as especially formative sites for the emergence of this environmentalism in Great Britain and the United States, respectively.

This development of the landscape of genius was a thoroughly transatlantic phenomenon. Hence the British writer Reference SaltHenry Salt, as quoted in the epigraph, invokes the British tradition of Wordsworth, Burns, Scott, and Gilbert White in a biography of the American writer Henry David Thoreau in order to define Thoreau’s relationship with his native Concord landscape (Life of Thoreau Reference Salt189). After he published his biography of Thoreau in 1896, Salt went on to publish On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills in 1908, in which he argued for the preservation of British mountain districts as a kind of national park, repeatedly invoking Muir, Yosemite, and the Sierra Nevada as an example (Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills Reference Salt12, Reference Salt92–93, Reference Salt97, Reference Salt120, Reference Salt125–26). Muir, in turn, owned a copy of Salt’s book in his own personal library¹ during the time of his campaign to preserve Hetch Hetchy, a seminal moment for American environmentalism. Thoreau and Muir, as later chapters will demonstrate, also modeled their relationships to what they understood as distinctively American landscapes after Wordsworth, Burns, and other British writers. The institution of the National Park, for which Muir’s Yosemite served as a prototype, emerged from the landscape of genius out of these transatlantic lines of influence, then was subsequently exported back across the Atlantic to Great Britain as well as around the world. While the association between nature, specific landscapes, and genius was also influential in other parts of the Anglophone world as well as across much of Western Europe, this book focuses specifically on British and American landscapes of genius as especially tightly interwoven and formative for a modern environmental movement.

The landscape of genius emerged out of the overall development of literary landscapes, or author countries: landscapes associated with and defined by the writings and reputations of specific authors. Scholars such as Nicola Watson, Alison Booth, and Ann Rigney have only recently begun to call attention to the massive and deeply pervasive influence of these literary landscapes during the long nineteenth century, in shaping not only authorial and literary reception but also national and transnational cultures and identities (Reference RigneyRigney, Afterlives; Reference Leerssen and RigneyLeerssen and Rigney; Reference BoothBooth; Reference WatsonWatson, Literary Tourist; Reference WatsonWatson, Literary Tourism). Literary landscapes emerged in the Anglophone world beginning in the latter half of the eighteenth century and developed during the nineteenth century into a major cultural phenomenon. British landscapes such as “Shakespeare Country” around Stratford-upon-Avon, Walter “Scott-land” in the border region and Scottish Highlands, the “Land of Burns” around Ayrshire in Scotland, and “Wordsworthshire” in the English Lake District developed into secular shrines and focal points for new forms of literary tourism and pilgrimage, as well as new practices of place-based literary interpretation. Literary pilgrimage narratives flooded British and American periodical writing. Together with literary guidebooks, atlases and gazettes, books of engravings, and other verbal and visual media, these narratives helped to spawn new literary heritage sites and tourist rituals, together with new transportation and lodging infrastructures. American literary landscapes followed British ones somewhat belatedly, coalescing in the second half of the nineteenth century around sites such as Washington Irving’s Sunnyside House and the Hudson River Valley; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Craigie House in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and above all Concord, Massachusetts, which became associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his supporting pantheon of transcendentalist writers, including Henry David Thoreau (Reference BoothBooth).

These nineteenth-century literary landscapes emerged directly out of new forms of reading through which readers sought intense, intimate, one-to-one identification with authors and their genius. Literary landscapes grounded that intense imaginative identification between reader and author in specific objects and places, establishing physical “sites of memory” through which visitors could seek communion with the lingering traces of authorial genius (Reference Nora and KritzmanNora and Kritzman; Reference RigneyRigney, “Plenitude”). Authors’ houses, gravesites, and artifacts, as well as other sites and landscapes they wrote in and about, became the focus for elaborate new rituals of literary pilgrimage that constituted the “homes and haunts” tradition. The discourse of genius was central to such sites, as authors and their genius functioned in these shrines as a kind of secular version of the Christian saint, mediating visitors’ relationships both to those authors’ literary works and to an unspecified but transcendent spiritual power (Booth Reference Booth57). Literary landscapes also had a deeply formative impact on authorial identities, as well as on nineteenth-century practices of literary appreciation and criticism. As Reference BoothAlison Booth writes, “by the early twentieth century, literary geographies and topographical biographies [were] central to the reception of major authors” (Reference Booth3), providing a physical habitus for new national literary canons and cultures.

Literary landscapes and the popular ritual practices associated with them subsequently became an embarrassment to modernist literary critics, who almost entirely ignored them. Recent scholarly attention to such landscapes, in contrast, participates in a burgeoning interest in reception history and the performative aspects of culture, which recognizes that the cultural influence and uses of literature extend far beyond the literary text (Reference LynchLynch). Literary scholars have increasingly come to see texts in this sense as sites of performance – a performance that participates in the larger dynamics of collective social memory and always requires some kind of physical as well as discursive site. Physical places are important to these imaginative processes, since, as Reference RigneyAnn Rigney writes, “memories tend to find spatial expression, in the sense that they seek to attach themselves to particular locations which can be visited in the here and now” (“Plenitude” Reference Rigney21). This process of social memory is dynamic and ever evolving. As Rigney also writes, “Memory sites are not fixed entities or finished products …, but rather imaginative resources for generating new meanings and contesting old ones.” While “remembrance crystallizes” around such sites of “collective significance,” this “memory is alive only as long as it generates new versions of itself” (Afterlives Reference Washington19, Reference Washington18, Reference Washington12). Social memory, moreover, is never homogenous or definitively established, but functions dynamically across time and place through various forms of social engagement, negotiation, and contestation, as texts and sites generate different meanings depending on people’s differing social locations, needs, and identities (Reference Olick and RobbinsOlick and Robbins; Reference RigneyRigney, “Plenitude”). The function and significance of a literary landscape as a site of memory is thus not simply fixed by some originating author, text, or event, but depends on ongoing communal processes of selection, interpretation, and communication. Such sites, in other words, depend on “constantly being reinvested with new meaning,” creating “an active and constantly shifting relationship to the past, in which the past is changed retrospectively in the sense that its meaning is changed,” and in which forgetting can be as important as remembering (Rigney, “Plenitude” Reference Rigney16–17).

This new understanding of collective social memory means that, in order to study the historical significance of literature, we cannot just return to the originating historical contexts of the text, as much current New Historicist practice tends to do. Instead, we need to study the whole reception history of texts and the many ways those texts have been enacted and performed in a wide variety of social and cultural contexts, tracing the various networks of relationships in which those enactments participate. The current book, in this spirit, does not focus primarily on interpreting literary texts in themselves or on their originating historical contexts, but instead explores the historically open-ended, mutually constitutive relationships between texts and landscapes and the impact of those relationships on various other practices and systems, such as the formation of liberal democratic national high cultures and an environmental movement. The book focuses, in other words, on how cultural texts and material landscapes interact with and impact one another, in ways that generate those texts’ and landscapes’ wider social and ecological significance. Just as landscapes shape texts, so too texts shape landscapes in an ongoing and open-ended historical dialectic.

Literary criticism that focuses on the relationship between texts and landscapes merges in this sense into a form of cultural and environmental studies, for to study the historical dialectics of literary texts and landscapes means that one must study practices and discourses as various as tourism and travel guides; literary pilgrimage narratives in newspapers, books, and magazines; the institutionalization of authors’ homes and various other kinds of museums; the formation of author societies; public festivals and ceremonies; landscape design plans and disputes; the activities of environmental and landscape preservation organizations; political campaigns, including editorials, pamphlets, speeches, and various government records; and many other forms of cultural activity. Studying such practices and their relation to landscapes makes the performative function of culture clear, for it quickly becomes obvious that texts have no set or definitive meaning in themselves, but mean what they are performed to mean, in particular social and historical contexts. To attempt to discover or pin down the ultimate truth of a text in its originating historical context, from this perspective, promotes a false sense of history as something fixed once and for all in the past. The living history of texts, in contrast, is always multi-dimensional, changing, and ongoing, as those texts are performed and reperformed within a constantly shifting array of relations, as much material and ecological as social and cultural. The book traces these evolving historical relationships between landscapes, authors, and texts, together with their larger social and ecological significance, thus generating new understandings of transatlantic nineteenth-century cultures of nature and the origins of an environmental movement. In so doing, it also models a new relational approach to the environmental humanities that focuses on how systems of culture intersect with and impact other kinds of systems: social, political, economic, material, ecological, and so on.

Few terms demonstrate the performative power of culture more pervasively than “genius,” as the following chapters explore. Genius cannot be objectively measured, despite many attempts to do so, and so has no clear external referent. Yet the discourse of genius proliferated across the Anglophone world and beyond in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as it became a keystone term not only for literature, aesthetics, and the fine arts but also for politics, history, philosophy, anthropology, and many other discursive fields. The discourse of genius founded the idea of the fine arts as a separate cultural sphere and played a central role in the creation of new national canons in literature, music, and painting. At the same time, it supported new models of both individual and national identity and justified social hierarchies of race, gender, and class that also promoted European colonization and empire. The discourse of genius became so pervasive and constitutive, connecting so many different spheres of culture, discourse, and social organization, that the Anglophone nineteenth century might well be known as the “age of genius.” Yet at the same time genius was an entirely fictional creation: one of Bruno Latour’s “beings of fiction” (Inquiry Reference Latour233–57). This social fiction of genius, produced by modern European and Euro-American cultures, helped to shape the development of national high cultures and a corresponding model of modern liberal democratic society, thus exerting immense social, cultural, material, and also ultimately ecological influence.

Nature too, as a concept defined by human cultures, can be understood as performative. While it refers to a radical otherness beyond our human understanding and language, the idea of nature, as William Cronon among others has argued, is also a “profoundly human construction,” inseparable from specific human meanings, social formations, and histories (Cronon Reference Cronon25). As Phil Macnaghten and John Urry claim, there is in these social terms no singular “nature,” only plural “contested natures,” each version of nature rooted in people’s specific forms of identity and carrying correspondingly specific forms of cultural power and hegemony (Reference Macnaghten and UrryMacnaghten and Urry). Yet the idea of nature, like that of genius, though in one sense fictive and performative, is in another sense also powerfully real, in that it deeply shapes people’s experiences, understandings, and actions and in so doing fundamentally impacts not only social and cultural but also material and ecological relations. Landscapes of genius played a key role in shaping nineteenth-century discourses of nature, as this book demonstrates, in ways that continue to have massive social, material, and ecological consequences.

Genius and nature emerged through such landscapes as interdependent keystone terms – that is, commonly paired terms that became fundamental not only to literature and other forms of high culture, but also to the overall construction of modern liberal democratic national societies. Genius’ association with nature as spontaneous, inborn, and innate – as opposed to the conventional, the mannered, and the socially learned – helped to naturalize new forms of nineteenth-century social order and identity as seemingly universal, permanent, and real. Association with genius conflated nature with White middle-class high culture, aesthetic appreciation, and the fine arts. Genius and nature came to function in these ways as mutually reinforcing transcendental signifiers, as both terms’ lack of a clear referent became a source of power rather than a limitation. Directed at one another like two otherwise empty mirrors, nature and genius could generate a seemingly infinite plentitude of unfathomable spiritual depth, thus helping to generate new versions of both autonomous individual and collective social identity: Reference Wordsworth and ReedWordsworth’s “something evermore about to be” (Prelude Reference Wordsworth and Reed6.542) and “sense sublime/ Of something far more deeply interfused” (Lyrical Ballads, “Tintern Abbey,” l. Reference Wordsworth, Butler and Green96–97), or Thoreau’s imagination that “dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes” and his “infinite expectation of the dawn” (Walden Reference Wordsworth, Butler and Green288, 90). Landscapes of genius, such as the English Lake District and Walden Pond, grounded this potentially dizzying play of transcendental signifiers in a local, physical site, rooting the spiritual power of nature and genius in the materiality of specific rocks and stones and trees.

Landscapes of genius, of course, also naturalized the status of the authors associated with them. In one sense, all literary landscapes were defined by the author’s genius and could thus plausibly be called “landscapes of genius.” Most literary landscapes, however, focused on human social traces and artifacts – houses, objects, memorials, grave sites, etc. – and so involved clear social mediation (Reference BoothBooth; Reference WatsonWatson, Author’s Effects). What this book calls landscapes of genius differ from other literary landscapes in focusing authorial identification significantly on natural as well as social elements, thus offering a particularly intense experience of communion with the author in and through nature, seemingly uninterrupted by social mediation. Landscapes of genius for this reason tended to coalesce around first-person writing – especially lyric poetry and descriptive non-fiction prose – that combined vivid naturalistic observation with a focus on the author’s own identity and imaginative processes. Such texts combined close attention to specific natural features and organisms with the overall aesthetic and spiritual contemplation of nature, laying the foundation for what eventually developed into the nature writing tradition. Culturally produced like any other site of memory, landscapes of genius could nevertheless claim to offer readers and visitors the opportunity to step outside of human society, history, and culture, constructing their identities in relation to the seemingly transcendent spiritual power of nature and genius.

By the mid-nineteenth century, in the wake of writers such as William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the association between genius and wild (as opposed to cultivated) nature had become a kind of truism. “Scenery and Mind,” the introductory essay to the popular 1852 American anthology, The Home Book of the Picturesque, claims in this regard that “all eminent geniuses are close observers of rural objects, and enthusiastic admirers of imposing scenery”; that “the noblest aspects and energies of nature have the finest and firmest control over the best minds”; and that “the love of nature is, indeed, instinctive in all superior minds” (Magoon Reference Magoon9, 14). To support such claims, the book then adduces a massive catalog of geniuses and their association with nature, from Biblical prophets to contemporary poets, ending with the assertion that

Such claims are clearly revisionist and unsubstantiable, but they demonstrate how powerfully axiomatic this association between genius and a wild and sublime nature had by then become.

This conflation of nature and genius did important cultural work for the formation of a new liberal democratic social order. Much like literature in the newly emerging national literary canons and painting and other visual arts in the newly emerging public art museums, nature in the nineteenth century was apparently universal and available to all, promising a seemingly inclusive democratic culture. Yet, at the same time, the cultural capital of this genius-infused version of nature, like that of other forms of aesthetic high culture, maintained various social distinctions and hierarchies (Reference BourdieuBourdieu): most notably between those who appreciated nature properly, in appropriate high-aesthetic ways, and those who did not (Reference Miller, Hemingway and VaughanA. Miller). Appeals to “nature” could support such distinctions even more effectively than appeals to other forms of high culture, since nature seemed to exist independent of human culture and history. Yet, of course, the desire and ability to appreciate nature in these ways depended on certain forms of aesthetic education, practices, and leisure characteristic of a specifically White middle-class cultural elite. The English working classes, for instance, tended to have a more communal and physical relation to the natural world, as in the late-nineteenth-century free access rambling movement (Reference TaylorH. Taylor). African Americans and Native Americans in the United States also tended to have a more pragmatic and communal orientation to nature, closely integrated with their social identities and everyday subsistence practices (Reference SmithSmith; Reference Glave and StollGlave and Stoll; Reference BerkesBerkes). The conflation of nature and genius, in contrast, defined nature as a form of high art for detached and disinterested aesthetic appreciation, thus supporting the hegemonic claims of a new form of White middle-class high culture to define national culture and identity. Landscapes of genius in this way contributed to a larger ideological shift in British and American society from an aristocracy of birth, wealth, and inherited title to a “democratic” meritocracy of genius.

Nature came to function in these cultural terms as an autonomous sphere set apart from everyday modern social and economic life, analogous to the fine arts. Early political efforts to defend or preserve “nature” thus tended to focus on landscapes of genius or on other natural areas associated specifically with literature and the fine arts, as part of a larger project of national aesthetic education. Such landscapes became defined in political terms as a special sphere of national high culture that must be defended at all cost against an all-consuming modern materialism and utilitarianism, as well as against popular culture and the working classes. The English Lake District and Yosemite became especially important sites in constituting this early version of environmentalism. It became common to compare the “desecration” of nature in such areas with the imagined desecration of various forms of high culture, such as cathedrals or artworks in national galleries. H. D. Rawnsley, in his 1883 opposition against the extension of the railways into the heart of the Lake District, for instance, describes the Lake District as “the heritage of every Englishman” and claims that that “Parliament might as well sanction the taking of the canvases from their frames in the National Gallery to be used for towels” (“Defence Society” Reference Rawnsley and Knight48, 50). Rawnsley also quotes approvingly from a letter that asks “if mining companies are to be allowed to fill up our lakes, and railway companies to destroy the grand sweep of our hillsides, where are our poets and artists to draw their inspiration in the future, and where are the masses to cultivate those higher feelings which make it alone possible to understand the artists and poets?” (“Defence Society” Reference Rawnsley and Knight51, original emphasis). The defense of the Lake District as Wordsworth’s landscape of genius became equivalent in these ways to the defense of English or British high culture and its forms of individual and national identity. John Muir’s and others’ defense of Yosemite against various forms of development employed this same high-cultural rhetoric, often with a more explicitly religious inflection, as when Muir calls Hetch Hetchy Valley “a grand landscape garden, one of Nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples” and fulminates against the “temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, [who] seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature” (Yosemite Reference Adams and Stillman255, 261–62).

Such high-cultural rhetoric, at once both aesthetic and spiritual, generated the institution of the National Park and became central to the preservationist focus of much modern environmentalism. In a 1950 essay on “The Meaning of the National Parks” (1950), for instance, the influential landscape photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams asks, “If the domains both of Nature and of art have strongly influenced our culture, why can we not now bring them into more definite association,” calling for the performance of “the greater works of art and music” in the parks in order to promote “the mingling of the emotional experiences of Nature and the aesthetic experiences of art” (My Camera Reference Adams18). Adams’s appeal, as well as his overall artistic oeuvre as a photographer, demonstrates the deep interconnection between nature, national high culture, and genius, part of the enduring historical legacy of the landscape of genius. The following chapters trace that important history and its arguably still-hegemonic impact on Anglophone ideas of nature, environmental culture, and the environmental movement.

* * *

Chapter 1 explores the overall significance of genius in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as it became associated with authorship, the fine arts, and nature in the production of a new form of cultural nationalism. The Romantic idea of genius supported new versions of both autonomous individualism and national identity, as readers identified through the genius of representative “great men” with the nation. Genius in this way simultaneously individuated and connected, playing a key role in the formation of national high cultures and canons as well as the overall creation of a new liberal democratic social order. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, genius also became increasingly associated with wild and sublime nature, thus naturalizing these newly emerging forms of social identity and laying the groundwork for the landscape of genius.

Chapter 2 demonstrates how Wordsworth’s association with the English Lake District established the new paradigm of the landscape of genius. Wordsworth’s example circulated widely in nineteenth-century Great Britain and the United States, strongly influencing Thoreau’s identification with Walden Pond. Wordsworth’s association with the Lake District and Thoreau’s association with Walden subsequently became foundational for the British and American nature writing traditions, in which authors and landscapes typically entered the nature–writing canon together. This chapter traces the historical development of those two landscapes of genius and the wider impact of their authorial associations. It shows how the Lake District and Walden Pond emerged as iconic sites for the development of an environmental movement, which sought to preserve such landscapes and their high-cultural associations from modern economic and technological developments, as well as from the incursions of the urban working class and popular culture.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore how the landscape of genius naturalized a specifically White, male, culturally elite version of both nature and nation. While Black, female, and laboring-class authors were sometimes recognized for their “genius,” that genius remained defined and delimited by their specific social identities. In contrast to White, male, elite-educated authors, who often became associated with nature and nation in universal ways, these other authors’ race, gender, and class barred them from full symbolic possession of the landscape and full identification with either nature or the nation. In part as a result of such continuing social distinctions, there is almost no equivalent of a landscape of genius for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) or women writers – no “Leslie Marmon Silko Land” or “Toni Morrison Country” – even for canonical writers whose works focus specifically on nature and landscape.

Chapter 3 begins by detailing how a British tradition of laboring-class poets became defined around the idea of “natural genius,” in direct contact with nature and in seeming opposition to learning and modern social life. While laboring-class poets such as John Clare were often labeled as geniuses and closely identified with specific landscapes, their genius did not mediate readers’ connection to nature or the nation in the same way as the genius of higher status authors. Laboring-class poets and their writings thus did not generally become focal points for landscapes of genius. Ann Yearsley, a late-eighteenth-century female laboring-class writer who proudly asserted her own independence and genius and publicly clashed with her patrons, faced additional limitations in associating with the landscape because of her gender. Robert Burns’s use of Scots dialect and strong association with Scottish nature and identity, in contrast, established him as a central figure for Scottish nationalism and led to the creation of the “Land of Burns,” which exerted significant influence on Wordsworth’s identification with the English Lake District. The chapter concludes with Reference CooperSusan Fenimore Cooper, whose Rural Hours (1850) preceded Reference Thoreau and ShanleyThoreau’s Walden by four years as the first major work of nature writing by an American woman. Cooper’s book was widely celebrated by reviewers and initially sold much better than Walden. As a genteel female writer, however, Cooper presented herself in a social and domestic relation to nature, rather than defining the landscape in relation to her own individual authorship, and deliberately dissociated herself from any claims to genius. Nineteenth-century British and American women authors tended to perform their gender identities in similar ways as they developed their own domestically oriented nature writing tradition and, as a result, rarely became focal points for landscapes of genius.

Chapter 4 explores Frederick Douglass’s attempt to establish his own landscape of genius at his estate at Cedar Hill, overlooking Washington DC in Anacostia, after his appointment as US Marshal for the District of Columbia in 1877. Douglass was famous for his genius as an orator especially, which became central to his power as an abolitionist and civil rights activist. This chapter also demonstrates his deep immersion in nineteenth-century discourses of literary landscape and nature. By seeking to naturalize his genius in the Cedar Hill landscape, Douglass affirmed not only his full cultural citizenship in the nation but also, as a representative figure, the cultural rights and status of all African Americans. Cedar Hill was memorialized after Douglass’s death and eventually became a National Historic Site, but its racial associations disqualified it as “nature” in the dominant White environmental imagination, obscuring this important aspect of Douglass’s identity. The chapter connects this specific history of Cedar Hill with the wider racialized construction of nature in American society.

Chapter 5 demonstrates how Muir’s association with Yosemite became fundamental to its cultural and environmental significance as a National Park and played a key role in the formation of modern environmentalism. Muir was deeply influenced by Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Burns and by the model of the landscape of genius in general. Muir represented nature in Yosemite as a form of high culture, analogous to the fine arts, in ways that defined the National Park as an institution and have exerted massive influence on modern discourses of nature. That high-cultural version of nature then shaped the history of preservationism and the American environmental movement, especially through the long political struggle from 1907–13 over the proposal to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley as a reservoir and source of electric power for the city of San Francisco. Muir’s association with Yosemite became central to that struggle, through which an elite national middle-class public of “nature lovers” coalesced around him and his writings. Though Muir and his allies lost the battle over Hetch Hetchy, that protracted political struggle, widely editorialized in influential newspapers and magazines across the country, popularized the idea of nature as a form of national high culture and led directly to the formation of the National Park Service in 1916. Muir’s preservationist politics embraced many of the same forms of environmental rhetoric initiated by earlier attempts to preserve Wordsworth’s Lake District: a transatlantic connection that launched the American environmental movement and evolved into a hegemonic form of twentieth-century environmentalism.

After a brief Conclusion, summing up the historical legacy and implications of the landscape of genius, a Coda chapter demonstrates the ongoing significance of the landscape of genius for contemporary environmentalism. This coda explores how Thoreau’s association with Walden Pond has been invoked in response to climate change. It uses extensive research into the psychology, sociology, and politics of climate change to assess what effects those invocations are likely to have and to suggest how scholars and activists can engage with Thoreau most impactfully in relation to the issue. More broadly, the coda also theorizes a new relational approach to the environmental humanities, which draws on recent developments in posthumanism, actor–network theory, systems theory, Anthropocene scholarship, and other environmental theory to explore how systems of culture intersect with and impact various other systems: social, political, economic, ecological, geochemical, etc. This method conceptualizes knowledge as fundamentally relational and performative, with the ultimate goal to comprehend and (re)balance our various relations. Its orientation is similar in this regard to many forms of Traditional Ecological Knowledge long practiced by Indigenous and other people. Environmental humanists, I argue, should not only trace relationships between various cultural, socioeconomic, and environmental systems in the past and present, we should also deliberately consider and attempt to shape the wider systemic impacts of our own scholarly acts, thus redefining the humanities as a form of self-reflexive ethical agency.

Landscapes of genius, this book demonstrates, fundamentally shaped modern ideas of nature and precipitated the emergence of an environmental movement in both Great Britain and the United States, establishing the social profile, agenda, and rhetoric of that movement. Such landscapes established nature as a form of high culture, associated with the fine arts, thus asserting new versions of White middle-class cultural hegemony. Landscapes of genius defined nature in this way as a sphere of individual leisure, contemplation, and imaginative and spiritual activity, in opposition to bodily work, subsistence, economic production, and social relationships. The nineteenth-century landscape of genius remains massively influential today through the various modes of Romantic nature appreciation that continue to define twenty-first-century Anglophone cultures of nature: not only in high-cultural genres such as landscape painting, photography, and nature writing, but also in more populist forms such as nature tourism and amateur tourist photography; film, television, and internet images and videos; and a wide range of commercial product advertisements.

The landscape of genius also continues to exert a significant impact on contemporary environmental politics and the environmental movement. Environmentalism in this tradition has focused especially on preserving specific areas of high-aesthetic natural beauty. By enabling the production of both autonomous individual and national identity, however, landscapes of genius have paradoxically supported the same modern liberal democratic social order that they have often been mobilized to oppose. That internal ideological split has paralyzed the mainstream environmental movement’s efforts to address increasingly complex and dire environmental problems, such as climate change, rendering it unable to envision a new social and environmental order. Such environmentalism, cast in the mold of the landscape of genius, has doomed itself to fighting a perpetual rearguard action against the same forces of modernity that it in other ways supports. At the same time, the ongoing legacy of the landscape of genius continues to support unjust and often unacknowledged social hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Understanding this cultural history can play an important part in an overall reimagination of nature and environmentalism, in order to enable the environmental movement to engage more effectively and more justly with escalating social and ecological crises such as species extinction, toxification, global poverty, environmental refugeeism, and climate change. To enter an age of ecology, among many other necessary changes, we must comprehend and reshape our relations to the landscape of genius.