American Environmental Fiction, 1782-1847

Matthew Wynn Sivils

Situating the origins of American environmental fiction in early Republic natural histories, Indian captivity narratives, juvenile literature, and the subsequent development of a uniquely American brand of environmental fiction that began with James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, Matthew Wynn Sivils argues that these works of early environmental thought contributed to a growing cultural conception of the environment's importance in shaping the identity of the fledgling nation decades before the influences of Emerson's Nature and Thoreau's Walden.