Reading the World in American Literature: From the Puritans to Contemporary Nature Writing 4219-RS275

1. Reading the World: An Introduction
2. Jonathan Edwards, Images or Shadows of Divine Things (selections)
Mason Lowance, “Jonathan Edwards and the Knowledge of God,” in: The Language of Canaan Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 249-276. (ASC library)
3. William Bartram, Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, Part II, Chapter III
Hans Huth, “Scientists, Philosophers and Travelers,” in: Nature and the American. Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1972, 14-29. (ASC library)
Pamela Regis, “Description and Narration in Bartram’s Travels” in: Describing Early America. Bartram, Jefferson, Crèvecoeur and the Influence of Natural History. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, 40-78.
4. Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies, Chapters IV-IX
Peter Antelyes, Tales of Adventures Enterprise. Washington Irving and the Poetics of Western Expansion. New York: Columbia UP, 1990, 45-91.
5. Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery”
Rochelle L. Johnson, Passions for Nature. Nineteenth-Century America’s Aesthetics of Alienaton. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2009, 66-90.
6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (I-IV), Journal (selections)
Kenneth Burke, “I, Eye, Ay – Emerson’s Early Essay on “Nature.” Thoughts on the Machinery of Transcendence,” in: Romanticism. Critical Essays on American Literature, eds James Barbour, Thomas Quirk. New York: Garland, 1986, 27-42.
Lee Rust Brown, The Emerson Museum. Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, 59-128.
7. Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, Chapters I-III
Annette Kolodny, “Recovering Our Mother’s Garden, in: The Land Before Her. Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860. Chapel Hill: The Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984, 112-130.
Michaela Bruckner Cooper, “Textual Wandering and Anxiety in Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes,” in: Margaret Fuller’s Cultural Critique. Her Age and Legacy, ed. Fritz Fleischmann. New York: Peter Lang, 2000, 171-189.
8. Edgar Allan Poe, “Eleonora,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” “Landor’s Cottage”
Kent Ljungquist, “Picturesque Disorder: The Deceptive Dream Land of Poe’s Fictional ‘Landscapes,’” in: The Grand and the Fair. Poe’s Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques. Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1984, 107-140.
9. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (“Brute Neighbors”), “Walking”
Laura Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds. Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995, 223-254.
10. Susan Fenimore Cooper, Rural Hours (“Spring”), “A Dissolving View” (in Essays on Nature and Landscape)
Lucy Maddox, “Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rustic Primer”; Tina Gianquitto, “The Noble Designs of Nature: God, Science, and the Picturesque in Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours,” in: Susan Fenimore Cooper. New Essays on Rural Hours and Other Works. Eds Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson. Athens and London: The Univ. of Georgia Press, 2001, 83-95, 169-190.
Rochelle L. Johnson, Passions for Nature. Nineteenth-Century America’s Aesthetics of Alienaton. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2009, 23-65.
11. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (sections 1-6), “Our Old Feuillage,” “Song of the Universal”
Jerome Loving, Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1982, 5-22, 55-82.
12. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (selections)
Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001, 182-199, 238-271.
13. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (selections)
Sandra Humble Johnson, The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1992.
14. Gary Snyder, selected poems
15. Discussion of term papers