Thomas Hallock – författare

The essays in this volume interrogate the unique and often problematic relationship between early modern cultural studies and ecocriticism, providing theoretical insights and models for a future practice that successfully wed the two disciplines.

The Epic of Florida brings to light a neglected tradition of colonial poetry from the sixteenth century. Written in response to dramatic encounters on the peninsula—Ponce de León’s landfall in 1513, the founding of St. Augustine in 1565, and ongoing conflicts among European empires and Native peoples—these works capture how early modern writers transformed violent and uncertain events into epic verse.This classroom-ready volume presents three substantial poems: Juan de Castellanos’s Elegy to Ponce de León, Bartolomé de Flores’s Memoir of the Happy Result, and Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo’s La Florida. Each text is introduced with clear headnotes and annotations, and a critical introduction situates la Florida within the broader imperial, cultural, and religious context of the Spanish Golden Age. Comparative “galleries” offer additional sources to help students understand how early poets interpreted exploration, conquest, and missionary encounters.By recovering this overlooked corpus, The Epic of Florida reframes colonial American literature as a multilingual, transatlantic project that predates the United States. The volume makes long and difficult poems accessible and engaging for classroom use, while opening new directions for research. It is ideal for courses in world literature, American and Latin American studies, and colonial history and will also interest Latin Americanists, scholars of Spanish and US literature, and general readers drawn to the early cultural history of Florida.

The Epic of Florida brings to light a neglected tradition of colonial poetry from the sixteenth century. Written in response to dramatic encounters on the peninsula—Ponce de León’s landfall in 1513, the founding of St. Augustine in 1565, and ongoing conflicts among European empires and Native peoples—these works capture how early modern writers transformed violent and uncertain events into epic verse.This classroom-ready volume presents three substantial poems: Juan de Castellanos’s Elegy to Ponce de León, Bartolomé de Flores’s Memoir of the Happy Result, and Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo’s La Florida. Each text is introduced with clear headnotes and annotations, and a critical introduction situates la Florida within the broader imperial, cultural, and religious context of the Spanish Golden Age. Comparative “galleries” offer additional sources to help students understand how early poets interpreted exploration, conquest, and missionary encounters.By recovering this overlooked corpus, The Epic of Florida reframes colonial American literature as a multilingual, transatlantic project that predates the United States. The volume makes long and difficult poems accessible and engaging for classroom use, while opening new directions for research. It is ideal for courses in world literature, American and Latin American studies, and colonial history and will also interest Latin Americanists, scholars of Spanish and US literature, and general readers drawn to the early cultural history of Florida.

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. |Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century and ending with the era of Indian dispossession, Hallock demonstrates how authors explored the idea of wilderness and political identities in fully populated frontiers. Includes discussion on the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, and James Fennimore Cooper, among others.

In 1765 the father and son naturalists John and William Bartram first explored the natural wonders of the St. Johns River Valley in Florida. Traversing a landscape virtually unknown at the time, one that was subtropical in many ways and then a British territory, they collected plants and made extensive observations of local animal life, geography, ecology, and native cultures of this essentially uncharted region. The Bartrams chronicled their adventures and, in doing so, helped provide the world with an intimate look at La Florida.Travels on the St. Johns River presents writings by these pioneering naturalists, including selections from John Bartram’s Diary, family correspondence, and William’s description of the St. Johns River Valley from his celebrated Travels. It also provides valuable editorial notes and a modern record of the flora and fauna they once encountered, allowing readers to see the land through the explorers’ eyes. This volume helps us rediscover the Bartrams’ history, their findings, and their Florida—as well as the Florida of today.

A selection of writings from naturalists John and William Bartram, who explored Florida in 1765In 1765 father and son naturalists John and William Bartram explored the St. Johns River Valley in Florida, a newly designated British territory and subtropical wonderland. They collected specimens and recorded extensive observations of the region’s plants, animals, geography, ecology, and Native cultures. The chronicle of their adventures provided the world with an intimate look at La Florida.Travels on the St. Johns River includes writings from the Bartrams' journey in a flat-bottomed boat from St. Augustine to the river's swampy headwaters near Lake Loughman, just west of today’s Cape Canaveral. Vivid entries from John's Diary detail the settlement locations of Indigenous people and what vegetation overtook the river's slow current. Excerpts from William's narrative, written a decade later when he tried to make a home in East Florida, contemplate the environment and the river that would come to be regarded as the liquid heart of his celebrated Travels. A selection of personal letters reveal John's misgivings about his son's decision to become a planter in a pine barren with little shelter, but they also speak to William's belated sense of accomplishment for traveling past his father's footsteps.Editors Thomas Hallock and Richard Franz provide valuable commentary and a modern record of the flora and fauna the Bartrams encountered. Taken together, the firsthand accounts and editorial notes help us see the land through the explorers' eyes and witness the many environmental changes the centuries have wrought.

A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Atzlán to Amherst explores a two-part question: what does travel teach us about literature, and how can reading guide us to a deeper understanding of place and identity? Thomas Hallock charts a teacher’s journey to answering these questions, framing personal experiences around the continued need for a survey course covering early American literature up to the mid-nineteenth century. Hallock approaches literary study from the overlapping perspectives of pedagogue, scholar, unrepentant tourist, husband, father, friend, and son. Building on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s premise that there is "creative reading as well as creative writing," Hallock turns to the vibrant and accessible tradition of American travel writing, employing the form of biblio-memoir to bridge the impasse between public and academic discourse and reintroduce the dynamic field of early American literature to wider audiences.Hallock’s own road course begins and ends at the Lowcountry of Georgia and South Carolina, following a circular structure of reflection. He weaves his journey through a wide swath of American literatures and authors: from Native American and African American oral traditions, to Wheatley and Equiano, through Emerson, Poe, and Dickinson, among others. A series of longer, place-oriented narratives explore familiar and lesser-known literary works from the sixteenth-century invasion of Florida through the Mexican War of 1846–1848 and the American Civil War. Shorter chapters bridge the book’s central themes-the mapping of cognitive and physical space, our personal stake in reading, the tensions that follow earlier acts of erasure, and the impossibility of ever fully shutting out the past. Exploring complex cultural histories and contemporary landscapes filled with ghosts and new voices, this volume draws inspiration from a tradition of travel, place-oriented, and literature-based works ranging from William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, Wendy Lesser’s Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, and Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch.An accompanying bibliographic essay is periodically updated and available at Hallock’s website.

New essays that illuminate and interpret William Bartram’s journey through what would become the southeastern United StatesWilliam Bartram, author of Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulees, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, was colonial America’s first native born naturalist and artist, and the first author in the modern genre of writers who portrayed nature through personal experience as well as scientific observation. His book, first published in 1791, was based on his journeys through southern Indian nations and Britain’s southern colonies in the years just prior to the American Revolution and provides descriptions of the natural and cultural environments of what would soon become the American South. Scholars and general readers alike have long appreciated Bartram’s lush, vivid prose, his clarity of observation and evident wonder at the landscapes he traversed, and his engagement with the native nations whose lands he traveled through.The Attention of a Traveller: Essays on William Bartram’s “Travels” and Legacy offers an interdisciplinary assessment of Bartram’s influence and evolving legacy, opening new avenues of research concerning the flora, fauna, and people connected to Bartram and his writings. Featuring 13 essays divided into five sections, contributors to the volume weave together scholarly perspectives from geology, art history, literary criticism, geography, and philosophy, alongside the more traditional Bartram-affiliated disciplines of biology and history. The collection concludes with a comprehensive treatment of the book as a material historical artifact.

New essays that illuminate and interpret William Bartram’s journey through what would become the southeastern United StatesWilliam Bartram, author of Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulees, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, was colonial America’s first native born naturalist and artist, and the first author in the modern genre of writers who portrayed nature through personal experience as well as scientific observation. His book, first published in 1791, was based on his journeys through southern Indian nations and Britain’s southern colonies in the years just prior to the American Revolution and provides descriptions of the natural and cultural environments of what would soon become the American South. Scholars and general readers alike have long appreciated Bartram’s lush, vivid prose, his clarity of observation and evident wonder at the landscapes he traversed, and his engagement with the native nations whose lands he traveled through.The Attention of a Traveller: Essays on William Bartram’s “Travels” and Legacy offers an interdisciplinary assessment of Bartram’s influence and evolving legacy, opening new avenues of research concerning the flora, fauna, and people connected to Bartram and his writings. Featuring 13 essays divided into five sections, contributors to the volume weave together scholarly perspectives from geology, art history, literary criticism, geography, and philosophy, alongside the more traditional Bartram-affiliated disciplines of biology and history. The collection concludes with a comprehensive treatment of the book as a material historical artifact.

Essays that fuse literary scholarship and personal travelogue to explore American identityA Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from AtzlÁn to Amherst explores a two-part question: what does travel teach us about literature, and how can reading guide us to a deeper understanding of place and identity? Thomas Hallock charts a teacher’s journey to answering these questions, framing personal experiences around the continued need for a survey course covering early American literature up to the mid-nineteenth century.Hallock approaches literary study from the overlapping perspectives of pedagogue, scholar, unrepentant tourist, husband, father, friend, and son. Building on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s premise that there is “creative reading as well as creative writing,” Hallock turns to the vibrant and accessible tradition of American travel writing, employing the form of biblio-memoir to bridge the impasse between public and academic discourse and reintroduce the dynamic field of early American literature to wider audiences.Hallock’s own road course begins and ends at the Lowcountry of Georgia and South Carolina, following a circular structure of reflection. He weaves his journey through a wide swath of American literatures and authors: from Native American and African American oral traditions, to Wheatley and Equiano, through Emerson, Poe, and Dickinson, among others. A series of longer, place-oriented narratives explore familiar and lesser-known literary works from the sixteenth-century invasion of Florida through the Mexican War of 1846–1848 and the American Civil War. Shorter chapters bridge the book’s central themes—the mapping of cognitive and physical space, our personal stake in reading, the tensions that follow earlier acts of erasure, and the impossibility of ever fully shutting out the past.Exploring complex cultural histories and contemporary landscapes filled with ghosts and new voices, this volume draws inspiration from a tradition of travel, place-oriented, and literature-based works ranging from William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, Wendy Lesser’s Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, and Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch.

An important figure in early American science and letters, William Bartram (1739–1823) has been known almost exclusively for his classic book, Travels. William Bartram, The Search for Nature’s Design presents new material in the form of art, letters, and unpublished manuscripts. These documents expand our knowledge of Bartram as an explorer, naturalist, artist, writer, and citizen of the early Republic.Part 1, the correspondence, includes letters to and from Bartram’s family, friends, and peers, establishing his developing consciousness about the natural world as well as his passion for rendering it in drawing. The difficult business of undertaking scientific study and commercial botany in the eighteenth century comes alive through letters that detail travel arrangements, enduring hardship, and mentoring. Commonly regarded as a recluse or eccentric, Bartram nstead emerges as deeply engaged with the major ideas, issues, and intellectual life of his time.Part 2 presents selections from Bartram’s diverse but little-known unpublished writings. Leading scholars in their field introduce manuscripts such as a draft for Travels, garden diaries faithfully kept, an antislavery treatise scrawled on the back of a plant catalog, a commonplace book, pharmacopoeia compiled for his brothers, and exacting accounts of Native American culture. Each selection reveals another dimension of Bartram’s unending interest in the world he encountered at home and while traveling through the southern colonies.