Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America

Environmental History, Jan 1999 by Burkholder, Robert E

Nature Writing The Pastoral Impulse in America. By Don Scheese. New York: Twayne, 1996. xxi 227 pages. Bibliography, notes, index, illustrations. $33.oo.

Don Scheese's purpose in Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America is to provide an introduction to a genre, and he succeeds admirably because of his insightful, close readings of key texts and his willingness to draw on landscape painting, nature photography, and his personal experiences in the outdoors to enliven his subject and make it concrete. In his initial chapter, he defines his eco-critical approach as "a way of reading both texts and the land itself, of trying to comprehend both the word and the world that inspired it, on their own terms" (p. lo), and it is this earnest desire to express the importance of text and world that perhaps best characterizes Scheese's critical stance, voice, and work as a whole.

In the eight brief chapters of this slim volume, Scheese manages to survey the history and defining characteristics of the nature writing genre and to examine selected works by several of its most important American exemplars-Thoreau, Muir, Austin, Leopold, Abbey, and Dillard. His introductory overview of the subject moves the reader quickly through a history of pastoralism from Theocritas to Terry Tempest Williams which focuses on the competing concerns that have been inherent in the pastoral mode for 2,500 years-wilderness versus civilization, antimodernism versus progress, and biocentrism versus anthropocentrism. Scheese's discussions of individual writers focus on the ways in which these oppositions have been negotiated.

What distinguishes Sheese's interpretations from those in similar introductory studies is his method of relating the visions of American nature writers to pictorial representations of landscape and to his own fieldwork in the locales of the writers he studies. For instance, he reads critical passages of Thoreau's "Ktaadn" against both Frederic Church's 1853 painting "Mount Ktaadn" and his own 1993 ascent of the mountain. Church's representation of the mountain permits Scheese to draw distinctions between the ways in which the painter and the writer resolve the tension between civilization and wilderness in their works, while Sheese's mountaineering experiences result in a novel interpretation of passages describing Thoreau's experiences at Katahdin's summit. According to Scheese, a person with Thoreau's mountaineering experience would not have been as disturbed at the top of Katahdin as many literary critics believe Thoreau was. Instead, Scheese believes, Thoreau actually added "potboiler" passages to his essay to enhance its popular appeal.

Scheese's interpretations of Thoreau as an unqualified wilderness advocate and Annie Dillard as a postmodern nature writer may be the strongest in the book, but each of the author-focused essays is a valuable introduction to the life and work of its subject. The book also includes a helpful chronology and a useful bibliographic essay that distills and evaluates the most important commentary on nature writing of the last century. Scheese's Nature Writing is a book that has a great deal to offer newcomers to the genre of nature writing, but it should also be of interest to seasoned scholars.

Reviewed by Robert E. Burkholder. Mr. Burkholder is Associate Professor of English at Penn State University-University Park. His most recent book is Emersonian Circles: Essays in Honor of Joel Myerson (University of Rochester Press, 1997), edited with Wesley Mott.