Dark Nature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Literature and Culture

by Richard Schneider (Editor), Frederico Bellini (Contribution by), Gina Claywell (Contribution by), Jesse Curran (Contribution by), Sarah Daw (Contribution by)

Overview

In The Ecological Thought, eco-philosopher Timothy Morton has argued for the inclusion of “dark ecology” in our thinking about nature. Dark ecology, he argues, puts hesitation, uncertainty, irony, and thoughtfulness back into ecological thinking.” The ecological thought, he says, should include “negativity and irony, ugliness and horror.” Focusing on this concept of “dark ecology” and its invitation to add an anti-pastoral perspective to ecocriticism, this collection of essays on American literature and culture offers examples of how a vision of nature’s darker side can create a fuller understanding of humanity’s relation to nature. Included are essays on canonical American literature, on new voices in American literature, and on non-print American media. This is the first collection of essays applying the “dark ecology” principle to American literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498528115
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	10/04/2016
Series:	Ecocritical Theory and Practice
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Richard J. Schneider is professor emeritus of English at Wartburg College

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Richard J. Schneider, “Introduction”
Dark Nature and the American Canon

1. Gina Claywell, “’Famine is a Frightful Monster’: Constructing Nature in Colonial Road Trips by Sarah Kemble Knight and William Byrd II”
2. Elizabeth Kubek, “‘Passage into New Forms’: The Negative Ecologies of Charles Brockden Brown”
3. Mark Henderson, “Dutchmen on the Brink: The Ghost Ship as Avatar of Dark (American) Nature in Poe’s ‘MS. Found in a Bottle.’”
4. Jesse Curran, “Thoreau’s Week and the Work of the Eco-lament”
5. Frederico Bellini, “The Gnostic Dark Side of Nature in Herman Melville and Cormac McCarthy: Carrying the Fire out of Arcadia”
6. Jennifer Schell, “Fiendish Fumaroles and Malevolent Mud Pots: The EcoGothic Aspects of Owen Wister’s Yellowstone Stories”
7. Monika M. Elbert, “Frontiersmen, Robber Barons, Architects, and the Darkening Aesthetics of Nature in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady”

Dark Nature and New Voices

1. Richard J. Schneider, “The Dark Side of Two Nature Writing Genres: Nature Noir and Wisconsin Death Trip”

9. Sarah Daw, “The ‘dark ecology’ of the Bomb: Writing the Nuclear as a part of
‘Nature’ in Cold War American Literature”
10. T. Mera Moore Lafferty, “The Poetry of Adele Ne Jame: Dark Nature, Cosmic Justice, and the Communion of Paradoxology”
11. Rachel Paparone, “Anti-pastoral Imagery and the Search for Cajun Identity”
12. Dana Prodoehl, “(Dark) Nature and Masculinity: The Anti-Pastoralism of Benjamin Percy’s The Wilding”
13. Matthew Masucci, “Hyperobjects, Plant Entelechy, and the Horror of Eco-Colonization in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy”
14. Isabel Galleymore, “’what’s the world but shine//and seem’: ‘Radical Kitsch’ and Mark Doty’s Environmental Poetics”

Dark Nature and the Media
15. Anette Vandsoe, “Listening to the Dark Side of Nature”
16. Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann, “Eco-Horror Cinematic Techniques in Television Nature Documentaries: Monsters Inside Me and the Dark Side of Nature”
17. David LaRocca, “Hunger in the Heart of Nature: Werner Herzog’s Anti-Sentimental Dispatches from the American Wilderness (Reflections on Grizzly Man)”

Editorial Reviews

Building on Timothy Morton’s concept of 'dark ecology,' Richard Schneider, a leading Thoreau scholar, has assembled a wide-ranging collection of essays that explore an American literary tradition of disturbing, sinister, and fearful encounters with nature. These 'anti-pastoral' writings provide new perspectives on the continually expanding discourse of ecocriticism.

David M. Robinson

Offering smart treatments of nature’s disinterest, disease, and horrors, these canon-busting essays on both historical and contemporary print and non-print media jolt ecocriticism away from any remaining tendency to rest in pastoral idealism.

Rochelle Johnson

Dark Nature [is a] signicant [contribution] to the existing scholarship on ecology and nature, for [it] explore[s] what we tend to characterize as the horrors of the natural world that, in turn, are impossible to neglect today, when the planet’s climate is changing so drastically. [This book] prove[s] the necessity of ecocriticism to concentrate on nature’s darkness, and not just on its pastoralism. Only having fully understood nature as both light and dark, welcoming and abhorring, comforting and punishing, humanity will be able to conceive of its own role in the natural world and view the environment as a living and constantly changing organism.. . Dark Nature will thus be of interest to scholars and students in environmental humanities as well as to general audiences who want to understand the duality of nature and why it is so important to know about and accept nature’s darkness.

Nature and Culture Journal for the Study of Religion