Environmental evasion

the long version

How do we reconcile the abstract reverence for the natural world central to American literary history, beginning with Ralph Waldo Emersons "Nature," with over a century and a half of widespread environmental destruction? Environmental Evasion examines the environmental implications of literary and cultural productions by writers from James Fennimore Cooper to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and Zora Neale Hurston. Lloyd Wills provocatively argues that the environmentalist outlooks of Cooper and Longfellow were eclipsed by Ralph Waldo Emersons abstract, imperialist vision of nature. He demonstrates how many twentiety-century American writers have taken the Emersonian approach, participating in a silent but extremely powerful form of evasive environmental politics in ways in which they write about the natural world. Attentive to the inherent political dimensions of all texts, Environmental Evasion insists on the relevance of environmental history and politics to New Americanist approaches to the literary canon.