Dark Nature

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

Dark Nature [is a] signicant [contribution] to the existing scholarship on ecology and nature, for [it] explore[s] what we tend to characterize as the horrors of the natural world that, in turn, are impossible to neglect today, when the planet’s climate is changing so drastically. [This book] prove[s] the necessity of ecocriticism to concentrate on nature’s darkness, and not just on its pastoralism. Only having fully understood nature as both light and dark, welcoming and abhorring, comforting and punishing, humanity will be able to conceive of its own role in the natural world and view the environment as a living and constantly changing organism. . . Dark Nature will thus be of interest to scholars and students in environmental humanities as well as to general audiences who want to understand the duality of nature and why it is so important to know about and accept nature’s darkness.

• Table of ContentsRichard J. Schneider, “Introduction”Dark Nature and the American Canon1.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 Voices8.Richard J. Schneider, “The Dark Side of Two Nature Writing Genres: Nature Noir