The Literary Heritage of the Environmental Justice Movement: Landscapes of Revolution in Transatlantic Romanticism (Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment)

__The Literary Heritage of the Environmental Justice Movement__ showcases environmental literature from writers who fought for women’s rights, native rights, workers’ power, and the abolition of slavery during the Romantic Era. Many Romantic texts take flight from society and enact solitary white male encounters with a feminine nature. However, the symbolic landscapes of Romanticism were often radicalized by writers like Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, William Apess, George Copway, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lydia Maria Child, John Clare, and Henry Thoreau. These authors showed how the oppression of human beings and the exploitation of nature are the twin driving forces of capitalism and colonialism. In addition to spotlighting new kinds of environmental literature, this book also reinterprets familiar texts by figures like William Blake, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and Walt Whitman, and it shows how these household figures were writing in conversation with their radical contemporaries. Contents 6 Chapter 1: Landscapes of Revolution 7 Literature and Environmental Justice 8 The Radical Pastoral and the Revolutionary Sublime 14 The Creature on the Summit 18 The Woman in the Forest 21 Landscapes of Revolution in Transatlantic Romanticism 27 Bibliography 34 Chapter 2: Black Nature 38 Hiking While Black 38 Anti-slavery Gothic, Radical Pastoral, and Revolutionary Sublime in Slave Narratives 43 Frederick Douglass, Nature, and Abolition 48 The Heroic Slave 51 Douglass and Free Soil 56 Landscapes of Revolution in My Bondage and My Freedom 62 Race and Labor in My Bondage and My Freedom 65 A Socio-Environmental Theory of Slavery 70 Land and Black Freedom 74 Bibliography 88 Chapter 3: The Native Wilderness 95 Landscapes of Indigenous Environmentalism 95 George Copway/Kahgegagahbowh and Identity as Performance 105 Authorial Identity in Copway’s Life, History, and Travels 108 The Native Wilderness Topos in The Life, History, and Travels 112 Alcohol, Methodism, and the Slow Violence of Colonialism 117 William Apess, Racism, and Indigenous Identity 120 The “Deep Brown Wilderness” of A Son of the Forest 123 The Politics of Methodism and Republicanism in A Son of the Forest 129 Bibliography 150 Chapter 4: The Green City 156 Intersectional Feminism and the Public Environment 156 Mary Wollstonecraft, Education, and the Body 159 Environmental Feminism in The History of the Condition of Women 162 The Green City in Letters from New-York 169 Bibliography 188 Chapter 5: The Commons 191 George Perkins Marsh and Liberal Environmentalism 191 John Clare, Henry Thoreau, and Walking the Commons 196 Thoreau’s Materialism and Environmental Possibilism 205 Bibliography 219 Afterword 222 Bibliography 229 Index 231 Front Matter ....Pages i-v Landscapes of Revolution (Lance Newman)....Pages 1-31 Black Nature (Lance Newman)....Pages 33-89 The Native Wilderness (Lance Newman)....Pages 91-151 The Green City (Lance Newman)....Pages 153-187 The Commons (Lance Newman)....Pages 189-219 Back Matter ....Pages 221-238