Table of Contents

Richard J. Schneider, “Introduction”
Dark Nature and the American Canon
1.Gina Claywell, “’Famine is a Frightful Monster’: Constructing Nature in Colonial Road Trips by Sarah Kemble Knight and William Byrd II”
2.Elizabeth Kubek, “‘Passage into New Forms’: The Negative Ecologies of Charles Brockden Brown”
3.Mark Henderson, “Dutchmen on the Brink: The Ghost Ship as Avatar of Dark (American) Nature in Poe’s ‘MS. Found in a Bottle.’”
4.Jesse Curran, “Thoreau’s Week and the Work of the Eco-lament”
5.Frederico Bellini, “The Gnostic Dark Side of Nature in Herman Melville and Cormac McCarthy: Carrying the Fire out of Arcadia”
6.Jennifer Schell, “Fiendish Fumaroles and Malevolent Mud Pots: The EcoGothic Aspects of Owen Wister’s Yellowstone Stories”
7.Monika M. Elbert, “Frontiersmen, Robber Barons, Architects, and the Darkening Aesthetics of Nature in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady”

Dark Nature and New Voices
8.Richard J. Schneider, “The Dark Side of Two Nature Writing Genres: Nature Noir and Wisconsin Death Trip”
9. Sarah Daw, “The ‘dark ecology’ of the Bomb: Writing the Nuclear as a part of
‘Nature’ in Cold War American Literature”
10. T. Mera Moore Lafferty, “The Poetry of Adele Ne Jame: Dark Nature, Cosmic Justice, and the Communion of Paradoxology”
11. Rachel Paparone, “Anti-pastoral Imagery and the Search for Cajun Identity”
12. Dana Prodoehl, “(Dark) Nature and Masculinity: The Anti-Pastoralism of Benjamin Percy’s The Wilding”
13. Matthew Masucci, “Hyperobjects, Plant Entelechy, and the Horror of Eco-Colonization in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy”
14. Isabel Galleymore, “’what’s the world but shine//and seem’: ‘Radical Kitsch’ and Mark Doty’s Environmental Poetics”

Dark Nature and the Media
15. Anette Vandsoe, “Listening to the Dark Side of Nature”
16. Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann, “Eco-Horror Cinematic Techniques in Television Nature Documentaries: Monsters Inside Me and the Dark Side of Nature”
17. David LaRocca, “Hunger in the Heart of Nature: Werner Herzog’s Anti-Sentimental Dispatches from the American Wilderness (Reflections on Grizzly Man)”

About the Author

Richard J. Schneider is professor emeritus of English at Wartburg College

Reviews

Building on Timothy Morton’s concept of 'dark ecology,' Richard Schneider, a leading Thoreau scholar, has assembled a wide-ranging collection of essays that explore an American literary tradition of disturbing, sinister, and fearful encounters with nature. These 'anti-pastoral' writings provide new perspectives on the continually expanding discourse of ecocriticism.
*David M. Robinson, Oregon State University*

Offering smart treatments of nature’s disinterest, disease, and horrors, these canon-busting essays on both historical and contemporary print and non-print media jolt ecocriticism away from any remaining tendency to rest in pastoral idealism.
*Rochelle Johnson, College of Idaho*