With a focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this chapter recounts the history of American nature writing in its many iterations. Like the essay in general, nature writing is a hybrid form. It is omnivorous, incorporating elements of travel writing, natural philosophy, ethnography, diarism, and epistolary writing. Nature writing of the period in question is filled with technical information on plants and animals, agricultural practices, and methods for hunting or navigating, but it also abounds with metaphysical speculations, theological pronouncements, elaborate landscape descriptions, and dramatic accounts of practices like hiking, camping, fishing, and farming. Authors of many of the most well-known essays had professional ties to disciplines like geology, botany, and forestry. Featured essayists in this chapter include St. John de Crèvecoeur, Meriwether Lewis, John Wesley Powell, John Muir, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, and John James Audubon, among others.

This chapter begins with varying definitions of the Anthropocene and articulates the ways in which essayists have responded to the environmental destruction, contamination, reshaping of the earth’s surface, and exhaustion of shared resources represented by this new geological epoch. In these types of essays, science writing meets nature writing, activism meets lyricism. The essay has always been a space for ethical reflection, and those essays featured in this chapter – by writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Barry Lopez, Camille Dungy, Donna Harraway, Fred Moten, and Christina Nichol – ponder the ethics of the violence that is part of our new environmental status quo. The chapter also investigates the relationship between the Anthropocene and various bleak contemporary and historical realities: the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonization, appropriation of land, extraction of resources, genocide, and dispossession.

Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang is a classic of politically aware American environmentalist fiction. While a literary descendant of Henry David Thoreau and a rough contemporary of figures such as Rachel Carson, Abbey’s politics are not entirely one with earlier nature writers and environmentalists. His novel is perhaps best known for bringing ecotage to the consciousness of a broad audience and inspiring such real-world actions as the political theater of groups such as Earth First. Some of the book’s success is certainly due to the degree to which it provokes critical reflection on problematic tensions in several areas central to environmentally conscious writing. One such tension is that which arises between, on the one hand, representations of environmental politics and, on the other, the politics of representations of nature. A second pertains to the question of the degree and manner in which issues of social justice intersect with environmentalist agendas. Along the way, the novel tests different models of ecological awareness, dramatizes the virtues and challenges of politically engaged grassroots environmentalism, and, perhaps especially due to its setting in the desert southwest, anticipates the increasingly urgent and globally relevant cluster of issues related to water rights, damming, and irrigation.

At the time of Sebald’s death in December 2001, a cult of all things “Sebaldian” was already emerging among his Anglo-American readership in particular. Since then, his consecration has reached almost hagiographic heights. His reticence in interviews and his reluctance to participate in the promotional circus of literary publishing amplified his posthumous apotheosis. The timing of his death after the release of the English translation of Austerlitz led to his rise beyond art and academia to cult author status. To many readers and even non-readers of his work, Sebald constituted a messianic exemplum of the “good German” and the “prime speaker of the Holocaust”, as well as a model proponent of the nature writing genre. This led to the creation of touristic walking routes that followed in the footsteps of his novels’ narrators, as well as social media reading groups, engendering further abstractions and misconceptions. Parodic articles emulating his style and overblown tributes only fuelled the cult’s fire. The suddenness of Sebald’s rise from obscurity to international stardom late in life, along with his unexpected demise merely half a decade later, ensure his cult status lives on.

This chapter surveys the history of nature writing and the nature essay, from American Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller to more recent writers such as Barry Lopez, Amitav Ghosh, and Camille T. Dungy. The author examines the political and scientific aspects of nature writing and the genre’s response to changing conceptions of “nature.”

In “The Nature of Literature,” Peter Remien and Scott Slovic examine nature’s role in the history of literary studies from Aristotle’s Poetics to the modern environmental humanities. The chapter begins with a close analysis of Sidney’s The Defense of English Poesy as an example of the premodern understanding of the parallel creative processes of art and nature. Not only does art imitate nature, as Aristotle asserts, but it furthers nature’s creative purposes. The chapter then constructs a genealogy of ecocriticism with attention to nature’s contested role as a central keyword. Attentive to nature’s ideological and metaphysical baggage, Remien and Slovic examine important critiques of the concept of nature by Derrida, Timothy Morton, and others, as well as claims of “the end of nature” in the Anthropocene. The final part of the introduction traces a broad history of nature in literary studies through an overview of the book’s three sections and twenty-one chapters.

In “Nature and Race,” John Gamber examines the role that ideas of nature and the natural have played in the construction of race through legal, economic, and pseudo-scientific discourses, as well as the increasing prominence of Black, Latinx, and Asian American voices in contemporary ecocriticism and environmental writing. Gamber points out that “the construction of nature writing as a white genre relies on multiple erasures” and turns to the work of Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Carolyn Finney, Laura Pulido, Jeffrey Myers, Dorothy Fujita-Rony, and many others to construct alternative genealogies of ecocriticism and environmental literature that do not privilege white voices. The chapter ends by engaging emergent scholarship in oceanic studies to posit fluidity as a better metaphor for thinking about nature and human life.

This chapter strikingly demonstrates the importance of medieval literary representations of the environment for more contemporary concerns. Amy Mulligan analyzes the medieval figure of the Sovereignty Goddess in literature written in the Irish language and shows its centrality in the environmental education of male rulers. Further relevance of the medieval for the contemporary ecological regime is revealed in treating medieval literature as one that provides a systematic understanding, often surprisingly scientific, such as Gerald of Wales’s accounts, “of Ireland’s birds and fishes” that are “invaluable in describing species, some of which are now extinct” and can act as guide to understand the nature of “ecological imperialism” in Ireland. Mulligan concludes that “All these medieval practitioners of Irish nature-writing develop a mode of thinking about the environment as a creative and generative space, one which is highly anthropocentric but which, through adoration, wonder, even recognition of something divine in the trees, soil, water, and animals” makes continued human habitability on this planet a historical possibility.

British nature writing is a conflict-ridden mode that speaks to contradictions in the modern condition, and a crisis-ridden mode that addresses the modern crises of the environment, of representation and of the alienated self. It returns repeatedly to problems of mimesis and the non-transparency of language, and to the slippages between ecological facts and the cultural imagination. ‘Nature writing’ is a problematic category, and classifications of earlier literature as such must be qualified, recognising the historical overlapping of environmental literature with natural history and other genres. Although British nature writing grew in dialogue with its American equivalent, it has always been less concerned than the latter with the wilderness, addressing more cultivated environments in which wildlife intermingles with human social and economic activity. The genre has long sought spiritual renewal and significance in wildlife and engaged in conservation movements, although its environmentalist ethics have not been consistent. British nature writing has also been deeply shaped by the pastoral and georgic traditions, causing it to waver between the foci of leisurely contemplation and laborious activity.

The years 1900–20 saw dramatic changes to the biological sciences and literary engagements with nature. In opposition to the lifeless collections of Victorian botanists, Arthur George Tansley and a small group of ‘botanical bolsheviks’ defined the modern field of Ecology as the study of vital, living plant interactions. The struggle between species that animated the new ecologists took on a stark reality during a war that blighted human life and landscape indiscriminately. Emerging from war, the literary modernism of Woolf, Joyce, and others presented a reassessment of life itself through an exploration of the mind in relation to its environmental surroundings. This chapter draws on Tansley’s lecture on ecology given at the Hampstead Scientific Society on 1 May 1914 in which he outlines ecology as a new ‘point of view’ on living ecosystems. It argues that the new ecology held more in common with energetic modernist manifestos such as BLAST (published two months later), which railed against ‘wild nature cranks’, than the descriptive views of beautiful nature found in Georgian poetry.

This chapter on Henry David Thoreau puts in relief the ecological commons and historiography of nature that issue from the environmental relations illustrated by the sketch. Connecting Thoreau’s Cape Cod to his “Dispersion of Seeds,” the chapter describes these relations in terms of the dispersal that follows from waves rising and receding upon the shore and tossing up weeds, corpses, and all kinds of salvage materials left from shipwrecks. The sketch’s seeing—and enacting—of relation as a littoral erosion and disintegration presents an alternate sense of how one lives with, pressed up against, familiarly or strangely, other species and races. If a romantic ecology might envision relations in the form of an interconnected cobweb, Thoreau’s late manuscripts release those slight silky threads to the air and lets them fly apart and ray out prismatically. This chapter follows how Thoreau’s sketches embody the ways in which text becomes a natural history of casualty, attending to species and race, and engaging with them by way of an environmental optics. The tenuous lines of sight draw a partial ecology that stretches and cleaves the liminalities between “nature” and Thoreau’s “I,” even as it disperses those very entities.

Nature writing has been parodied for what Richard Kerridge identifies as ‘purple prose’. Given the remarkable resurgence of the popularity of nature writing in the first decades of this century, this chapter considers how nature writers now can develop a prose style that avoids the excesses traditionally associated with the genre and that will face up to and not shrink from the threats to nature, including ‘global warming and the huge loss of wildlife populations’, that demand perspectival shifts between the local and the global, the personal and the planetary.

“The Ecological Alternative” examines the intersection of appeals to ecology and authenticity among the American New Left and its environmentalist affiliates. The chapter also considers how literary representations of this alliance dramatize its contradictions. Many student radicals, especially those receptive to Murray Bookchin’s philosophy of social ecology, sought to structure alternative social arrangements that would liberate the individual psyche, the institutions that repressed it, and the environment itself. However, Bookchin’s writing, like that of the New Left’s primary theoretical influences, drew substantially on a psychoanalytic narrative that, when grafted to ecology, framed the self prized so highly by student radicals as yet another repression – one that obscured the reality of ecological interconnection. Edward Abbey, especially, documented this subjective confusion in Desert Solitaire (1968). Far from uncritically celebrating nature’s purity, Abbey and other nature writers of the decade established a representational tension between self and ecosystem that would characterize postwar literary treatment of ecology.