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.
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'Recommended.' T. Bonner Jr, 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, American Literary History
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This book discusses how literary writers re-envisioned species survival and racial uplift through ecological concepts of dispersal.
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.
Juliana Chow is a scholar of American literature and the environment and feminist science studies; and she has published both academic and creative writing. She is on the board of Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies (INCS) and has held a research fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society.
