Synopses & Reviews
In 1844, Lydia Sigourney asserted, andquot;Man's warfare on the trees is terrible.andquot; Like Sigourney many American women of her day engaged with such issues as sustainability, resource wars, globalization, voluntary simplicity, Christian ecology, and environmental justice. Illuminating the foundations for contemporary women's environmental writing,
Fallen Forests shows how their nineteenth-century predecessors marshaled powerful affective, ethical, and spiritual resources to chastise, educate, and motivate readers to engage in positive social change.
Fallen Forests contributes to scholarship in American women's writing, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and feminist rhetoric, expanding the literary, historical, and theoretical grounds for some of today's most pressing environmental debates. Karen L. Kilcup rejects prior critical emphases on sentimentalism to show how women writers have drawn on their literary emotional intelligence to raise readers' consciousness about social and environmental issues. She also critiques ecocriticism's idealizing tendency, which has elided women's complicity in agendas that depart from today's environmental orthodoxies.
Unlike previous ecocritical works, Fallen Forests includes marginalized texts by African American, Native American, Mexican American, working-class, and non-Protestant women. Kilcup also enlarges ecocriticism's genre foundations, showing how Cherokee oratory, travel writing, slave narrative, diary, polemic, sketches, novels, poetry, and exposandeacute; intervene in important environmental debates.
Review
andquot;Kilcup's career as a noted scholar of American women's writings is on full display in this book. Analyzing the works of nineteenth-century women writers from diverse racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds, Kilcup illuminates these writers' complex, often conflicting interactions with the natural world.andquot;andmdash;Tina Gianquitto, author of andquot;Good Observers of Natureandquot;: American Women and the Scientific Study of the Natural World, 1820-1885
Review
andquot;Beautifully written, meticulously researched, and brilliantly argued, Fallen Forests is a major contribution to ecocriticism and to the study of nineteenthcentury American women writers more broadly. Kilcup's impressive expertise animates this engaging, original analysis of how canonical and noncanonical American women writers' acts of environmental representation were profoundly shaped by class, as well as by gender and race. A remarkably dexterous and insightful work of ecocritical scholarship.andquot;andmdash;Michael P. Branch, editor of Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing before Walden
Review
andquot;Unprecedented in its refusal to adhere to narrow understandings of environmental experience, Fallen Forests forges an ambitious reconsideration of environmental writing in the early United States. Kilcup unearths a wide range of womenandrsquo;s early engagement in issues central to environmental justice. She pursues authorsandrsquo; labor status, physical ability, spiritual affiliation, and geographical location alongside critical historical events, including the early resource wars that accompanied EuroAmerican settlement of western lands, the influence of social standards that propelled the fashion industry and conspicuous consumption, and the complex relation between bodies, cultural beliefs, and geography that informed Native and Mexican American land claims. Welcome and timely, Fallen Forests reveals early Americaandrsquo;s engagement with issues that continue to grip the nationandrsquo;s environmental injustices.andquot;andmdash;Rochelle L. Johnson, author of Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century Americaandrsquo;s Aesthetics of Alienation
Review
andquot;Scholar Kilcup is clearly passionate about American women's writing, as evidenced in this meticulously researched text. . . . This book is for academic audiences, especially readers with an interest in 19th-century American literature, women's literature, and ecofeminist criticism.andquot; andmdash;Stacy Russo, Library Journal (starred review)
Review
andldquo;In this wide-ranging, deeply insightful book, Kilcup both extends and challenges current thinking about American womenandrsquo;s writings about the environment in the long 19th century. By addressing various time periods, genres, and ethnicities, the author claims that 19th-century women writers interested in the environment demonstrate what she calls andlsquo;literary emotional intelligenceandrsquo;andmdash;that is, various affective literary approaches to rally for environmental consciousness and change. Adding to the field of rhetorica, or womenandrsquo;s rhetoric, this book makes a valuable contribution to making andlsquo;audibleandrsquo; many now-forgotten womenandrsquo;s voices.andrdquo; andmdash;Choice
Review
andquot;Students of U.S. history could benefit from reading Fallen Forests. . . . Kilcup presents a richly varied portrait of womenand#39;s environmental writing as the United States became a continental empire.andquot; andmdash;James Perrin Warren, Journal of American History
Review
andquot;Kilcupandrsquo;s writing is refreshingly clear; her close readings are perceptive and sensitive to context; and the bookandrsquo;s scholarship is impeccable, featuring eighty pages of small-print endnotes and a fifty-six page bibliography. In addition to its valuable contributions to ecocriticism and feminist rhetoric, Fallen Forests will be a wonderful resource for teachers, introducing understudied texts that, as Kilcup deftly shows, link meaningfully to pressing contemporary issues.andquot; andmdash;Cheryll Glotfelty, American Literary Realism
Review
andldquo;Fallen Forests: Emotion, Emobodiment, and Ethics in American Womenandrsquo;s Environmental Writing, marks the latest installment in Karen L. Kilcupandrsquo;s notable, career-long devotion to the recovery of American womenandrsquo;s writing from the long nineteenth century. . . . This sizeable study provides a scrupulously researched analysis that spans not only genre categories but also the races, classes, and the physical landscapes comprising the nation.andrdquo;andmdash;Rochelle L. Johnson, Tulsa Studies in Womenandrsquo;s Literature
About the Author
Karen L. Kilcup is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her many books include Teaching Nineteenth-Century American Poetry and Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Grounding the Texts: An Introduction 1
Chapter 1
andldquo;We planted, tended, and harvested our cornandrdquo;: Native Mothers, Resource Wars, and Conversion Narratives 21
Chapter 2
andldquo;Such Progress in Civilizationandrdquo;: Forest Life and Mushroom Growth, East, West, and South 75
Chapter 3
Golden Hands: Weaving America 133
Chapter 4
Gilt-Edged or andldquo;Beautifully Unadornedandrdquo;: Fashioning Feelings 201
Chapter 5
Domestic and National Moralities: Justice in the West 267
After Words: Toward Common Ground 329
Notes 349
Bibliography 429
Index 487