From the fallen tree : frontier narratives, environmental politics, and the roots of a national pastoral, 1749-1826 / Thomas Hallock.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hallock, Thomas.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Frontier and pioneer life--United States--Historiography.

Frontier and pioneer life.

Frontier and pioneer life--West (U.S.)--Historiography.

Environmental policy--United States--History.

Environmental policy.

Environmental policy--West (U.S.)--History.

Frontier and pioneer life in literature.

Pastoral literature, American--History and criticism.

Pastoral literature, American.

Environmental literature--History and criticism.

Environmental literature.

United States--Description and travel.

United States.

United States--Historiography.

West (U.S.)--Historiography.

West (U.S.).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (311 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c2003.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Anglo-American writers in the revolutionary era used pastoral images to place themselves as native to the continent, argues Thomas Hallock in From the Fallen Tree. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, as territorial expansion got under way in earnest, and ending with the era of Indian dispossession, the author demonstrates how authors explored the idea of wilderness and political identities in fully populated frontiers. Hallock provides an alternative to the myth of a vacant wilderness found in later writings. Emphasizing shared cultures and conflict in the border regions, he reconstructs the milieu of Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, William Bartram, and James Fenimore Cooper, as well as lesser-known figures such as Lewis Evans, Jane Colden, Anne Grant, and Elias Boudinot. State papers, treaty documents, maps, and journals provide a rich backdrop against which Hallock reinterprets the origins of a pastoral tradition. Combining the new western history, ecological criticism, and native American studies, Hallock uncovers the human stories embedded in descriptions of the land. His historicized readings offer an alternative to long-accepted myths about the vanishing backcountry, the march of civilization, and a pristine wilderness. The American pastoral, he argues, grew from the anxiety of independent citizens who became colonizers themselves.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

Notes

Chronology

Introduction: Closing the Wilderness, Opening the Frontier

Meliorem Lapsa Locavit

Ideas of Nature

Part I. The Western Text

1. The Imagined West: Lewis Evans

A Path Taken Together: Lewis Evans and the Iroquois

Lewis Evans and the Imagined West

Thomas Pownall: Revising the Imagined West

Conclusion: Natives, Nature, and Imperial Geography

2. The Contested West: John Wilson's Kentucke

Nature, Nation, and Natural History

Daniel Boone and the Captive Environment

Conclusion: ''Avail Yourselves of the Benefits of Nature''

Part II. Improvement

3. Textual Boundaries, Discursive Control: Stories of the Land in the Susquehanna Valley

''Mammy Where Are We Going?'': The Limits of Frontier Prose in ''Susquehannah''

The ''Wyomen'' of Treaty Literature

4. Jefferson's Nature and the Trans-Appalachian West: Notes on the State of Virginia

Ideological Geography and the Disappearing West

Jefferson, Logan, and the Vanishing Native

Conclusion: ''Wherefore the Forgery?''

Part III. Protégés

5. Collaboration, Incorporation, and Environmental Discourse: Lewis and Clark, Jane Colden

Was That a Hoh-host or a Yâck-kâh?

Fractures in an Imperial Narrative

Collaboration, Incorporation, Triangulation

Jane Colden and the Charleston Network

Alexander Garden's Trip to the Cherokee Mountains

6. On the Borders of a New World: William Bartram's Travels

Four Ways of Looking at a Sinkhole: The Construction of a Literary Natural History

Transformations, Personal and Political

Four Views of the Alachua Savanna: The Ideological Work of Travels

Part IV. Settlement &amp

Appropriation

7. Reversing the Revolution through Nature: Anne Grant, Timothy Dwight.

Anne Grant's Colonial Ecology

Marking Change, Registering Loss: Timothy Dwight's Travels

The Roots of a Pastoral

8. Disappearance and Romance: Cooper's The Pioneers

Nature, Nostalgia, and Native Americans

Romancing the Contact Zone

''This, Then, Is Thy Indian Blood?'': Becoming Native to Place

Nostalgia, Guilt, and Nation Building

Coda: Parallel Republics

Bibliography

Index

A-C

D-F

G-L

M-P

R-Y.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 227-283) and index.

ISBN:

9798890877376

9780807861653

0807861650

OCLC:

56356650