What we read influences how we interact with the natural world. Ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment, an earth-focused view of literary scholarship.
The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) is dedicated to environmental literature and culture. The organization offers grants, conferences and advocacy opportunities for advancing the protection of the environment, the planet and its creatures through literature and writing.
Add your suggestions -- other authors whose writings have shaped the conservation movement in the United States. Use the comments area on this posting to share information.
Using records of Thoreau's selections from Harvard Library, we know those books are among the texts Thoreau himself consulted. For a more complete discussion of Thoreau's vast reading, consult the bibliography by Robert Sattelmeyer. Thoreau’s Reading: A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988. The Walden Institute maintains a library and bibliography of Thoreau's work.
A couple of decades after Thoreau was writing, later in the 19th century, readers forgot or ignored the writers who preceded him. Thoreau becomes a near-mythic American character, an actor in the environment he writes about, rather than a theorist or sermonizer like Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Writers of the generation after Thoreau (John Burroughs, for example) described Thoreau as the founder of the natural history essay, citing his fluidity with language or his passionate social conscience.Perhaps Thoreau’s wildness, his physical closeness to nature was an obvious credential.But some question whether he should be named the inventor of the natural history essay when there were so many earlier nature writers.
Environmental writing flourished in the U.S. during the second third of 19th c. because specialization in branches of natural science created an opportunityto communicate aspects of natural science to non-scientists who were eager to learn about the world around them. Urbanization produced readers who missed nature. At the time, there was an array of literary media – books, periodicals, journals, newsletters and people regularly attended lectures and symposia offered in community meeting halls, libraries, athenea, and other public buildings.
It's generally acknowledged that the first American to produce a nonspecialized book of environmental essays was John D. Godman, whoseRambles of a Naturalist was published by Ash in Philadelphia in 1833 as a serial, then published in a collection, without financial success.
Thoreau was influenced by:
*Literary almanacs such as The Book of the Seasons, by William Howitt, Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1831.A book of wit, wisdom and sketches about nature, tips for rural residents, seasonal changes, poems.
*Secular sermons and religious homilies such asR.W. Emerson’sNature, now a literary classic and a source of inspiration for many contemporary nature writers. During Thoreau's time, and now, middle-brow writers mix quasi-religious lessons with natural history observation, Emerson excepted.
*Picturesque writing – prose writing designed to evoke certain vistas using vocabulary culled from the arts.Often illustrated, much like today’s coffee-table books.
*Regional writing was most significant in Thoreau's background reading, especially early major work of American literary bioregionalism such as:
Susan Fenimore Cooper (JFC’s daughter & literary executor). Rural Hours, New York: Putnam, 1850 (abridged 1887) which Thoreau consulted to learn about Otsego county.
*Natural History Writing – a cross between science writing and literary natural science writing drenched with facts and written with a sober, pedantic tone.
