As ecocriticism matures as a method of reading literature’s treatment of the nonhuman environment, the field’s focus moves beyond texts explicitly about conventionally conceived nature to include works that circumvent, ignore, or repudiate the pastoral. This shift in attention from wilderness, frontier, and garden leads to a diverse set of authors and writings that redraw the lines between nature and culture. Although they work within different historical periods, Fallen Forests and The Ecology of Modernism reflect this trend, extending the range of material that can be read with ecocritical concerns.
Fallen Forests traces the long-nineteenth-century women writers’ use of environmental rhetoric to further communitist and activist goals in what we now recognize as resource wars. Lydia Sigourney, Harriet Wilson, Pauline Hopkins, Sarah Winnemucca, and Zitkala-Ša, to name but some of the figures treated in Fallen Forests, engage lived experience by invoking genre compression and hybridization; adopting humor, the sentimental,...
