Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History

Juliana Chow

doi:10.1017/9781108990660

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.

‘Recommended.’

T. Bonner Jr Source: Choice

‘… offers a model for seeing, describing, and representing the natural world that has the potential to inspire future scholarship that is similarly attentive to the partial, the transitional, and the seemingly inconsequential.’

Juliane Braun Source: American Literary History

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Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History

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Contents

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History
pp i-i

Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture - Series page
pp ii-ii

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History - Title page
pp iii-iii

Copyright page
pp iv-iv

Contents
pp v-v

Figures
pp vi-vi

Acknowledgments
pp vii-x

Introduction
pp 1-30

Chapter 1 - Sketching American Species: Birds, Weeds, and Trees in Audubon, Cooper, and Pokagon
pp 31-68

Chapter 2 - “Because I see—New Englandly—”: Emily Dickinson and the Specificity of Disjunction
pp 69-97

Chapter 3 - Coral of Life: James McCune Smith and the Diasporic Structure of Racial Uplift
pp 98-141

Chapter 4 - Thoreau’s Dispersion: Writing a Natural History of Casualties
pp 142-182

Afterword: &
pp 183-190

Notes
pp 191-222

Index
pp 223-224

Recent Books in This Series (continued from page ii) - Series page
pp 225-228

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Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History

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