Amazon.com Review
The best writing about nature, literary scholar Lawrence Buell suggests, has at its root an argument that humans are accountable to the environment. In the American literary canon, the work that best demonstrates this thesis is
Henry David Thoreau's classic
Walden, a memoir celebrating at once the virtues of voluntary simplicity and the quest for political liberty. It is from
Walden that much contemporary writing about nature derives, from the poems of the Kentucky farmer
Wendell Berry to the back-to-the-land exhortations of
Edward Abbey and
Annie Dillard. In this study, Buell charts the growth of Thoreau's own environmental ethic and his lasting influence on writers of many kinds, among them
Theodore Roethke,
Gary Snyder,
James Lovelock,
Rachel Carson, and
Aldo Leopold. He also examines Thoreau's life, reminding his readers that although Thoreau will always be identified with that little Massachusetts pond, he was a wide-ranging traveler and thinker who was never quite comfortable at rest. Neither, Buell reminds us, is Thoreau always to be taken as a strictly reliable narrator; parts of
Walden are fictionalized and embellished, and the book should not be reduced to "the autobiographical narrative alone," but instead should be seen as something of a parable. Buell's discussions will be of interest to any serious student of Thoreau's writings.
--Gregory McNamee
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Review
Literature generally defines itself as that realm of higher culture freed from both the sloppy nostalgia of nature lovers and the fact-bound objectivity of science. The resulting paradox gives Lawrence Buell his subject: nature writing survives in American literary and cultural studies as an 'enclave canon,' widely ignored even as the idea of nature is acknowledged to be formative to American culture and central to at least one canonical writer, Henry David Thoreau. In this fine book, Buell uses Thoreau's position at the crux of this paradox to argue for the return of nature to literary criticism and theory...Buell's excellent book is essential reading that for years to come will provide a central point of reference in discussions of Thoreau, environmental writing, and realist aesthetics.
--Laura Dassow Walls (
Isis )
The Environmental Imagination has become a standard work on the subject, and a pioneering example of what is being called 'ecocriticism.'
--Jay Parini (
New York Times Magazine )
[A] remarkable book...Building upon and brilliantly extending the new ecocriticism, Buell has made the most of Thoreau as cultural icon as well as major literary and intellectual figure, in the process raising the stakes and broadening the responsibilities of Thoreau scholarship and criticism.
--William Rossi (
ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance )
Lawrence Buell has undertaken a heroic task: to reorient the understanding of American literature and culture towards 'ecocentrism'; that is, to place the environment (and not simply humans within the environment) at the center of American literary studies. Further, its concern for 'the literal environment as opposed to the environment as a cultural symbol,'
The Environmental Imagination is a respectful effort to supplement if not displace Leo Marx's
The Machine in the Garden in American studies. Buell carries out his tasks largely by examining the implications of
Walden on literature and environmental consciousness in the United States...That
The Environmental Imagination can be deciphered by a lay reader is a tribute to a thesis that is both comprehensible and worth learning about.
--Charles A. Miller (
New England Quarterly )
A groundbreaking study...It is at once comprehensive, the bibliography alone comprising almost 140 pages of detailed notes; urgent, pressing upon our own imagination the real consequences of literary conventions of representing nature; and controversial, insightfully critiquing various cherished cows of contemporary literary theory...
The Environmental Imagination is sure to be a standard reference for scholars of both Thoreau and the tradition of American nature writing.
--Robert Anderson (
Growth and Change )
Lawrence Buell's
The Environmental Imagination is among the first ambitious and comprehensive attempts to define ecocriticism and establish its central issues and the mainstream of its tradition--at least, for Buell, in America. In that respect, it resembles some of the seminal works in women's studies, as a book that both argues for the legitimacy of its subject and reveals how it has a history, a solid tradition, that parallels the ones long-since established in the mainstream genres...
The Environmental Imagination...will play a central role in establishing literary ecocriticim as a major field and will assume a place as one of that field's canonical texts...Its argument will rightly be acknowledged in all serious treatments of American nature writing from this point forward.
--Frederick W. Shilstone (
South Carolina Review )
