Ecology and Literature

Employing a groundbreaking rhetorical and ecocritical approach, this volume advances personification/anthropomorphism as a means of representing the natural world and arguing for its worth outside of human use.

PART I: PERSONIFICATION IN PRACTICE AND THEORY Rhetorical Approach Ecocentrism Ecocentric Personification Anthropomorphism: Resistance and Inevitability The ubiquity of Anthropomorphism Anthropomorphism and Ethology Anthropomorphism as Taboo and Norm in Nature Writing Personification Theory The Demotion of Personification Personification and Allegory: Abrams and de Man PART II: ANTHROPOCENTRIC AND ECOLOGICAL ANTHROPOMORPHISM THROUGH WESTERN HISTORY Antiquity Early Christian, Medieval Early Science The Enlightenment English Eighteenth-Century Poetry Wordsworth and the Birth of Ecological Poetry Darwin PART III: ANTHROPOMORPHIC SUBVERSION IN AMERICAN LITERATURE Early America William Bartram Early American Romanticism Emerson Herman Melville and Anti-anthropocentric Personification Walt Whitman and 'Song of Myself,' Chant 32 Emily Dickinson The Naturalists (Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London) William Faulkner's Bear Robinson Jeffers and the Tragedy of Anthropocentrism Flannery O'Connor's View of the Woods Ecocentric Personification in post World War II American Poetry PART IV: ECOCENTRIC PERSONIFICATION IN AMERICAN NATURE WRITING Henry David Thoreau John Muir Mary Austin Aldo Leopold Loren Eiseley Edward Abbey Annie Dillard Terry Tempest Williams Ecocentric Personification in Three Twenty-First Century Works