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106Rocky Mountain Review Environmentalism and Literary Studies Stephanie Sarver University of California, Davis Rick Bass. Platte River. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. 145 p. James I. McClintock. Nature's Kindred Spirits. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. 180 p. Vera Norwood. Made From This Earth. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. 368 p. John P. O'Grady. Pilgrims to the Wild. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993. 169 p. Terry Tempest Williams. An Unspoken Hunger. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. 146 p. L/iterary scholarship has long been fascinated with the way that nature has informed and shaped American thought. In the 1970s, the environmental movement brought a new dimension to studies of nature, which was reflected in the work of scholars such as Annette Kolodny and Joseph Meeker. In The Lay of the Land, Kolodny brought together feminism and environmentalism to examine gendered depictions of the land in male-authored texts.1 She suggested a connection between language and the domination of women and nature. Meeker, in The Comedy of Survival, turned to ecology and considered the ways that classical literary modes may or may not promote ecologically sound human behavior. Others, such as William Rueckert, who is credited with inventing the term "ecocriticism," looked to writers who brought an ecological sensibility to their work. The study of nature in literature assumed a higher profile in the early 1990s, when a group of scholars called for a formal union of environmentalism and literary studies.2 The 1991 MLA convention responded by including a session entitled Ecocriticism: The Greening of Literary Studies. There, Cheryl] Burgess Glotfelty defined ecocriticism as an effort to expand literary studies from a focus on the "social sphere" exclusively, to include the "ecosphere." She explained that ecocriticism "takes as its subject the interconnections between the material world and human culture". The following year, several hundred environmentalists and scholars formed the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) to support and promote an ecocritical approach to literary studies. Ecocriticism is less a practice associated with a theoretical apparatus as with a sensibility; thus, the task of defining the ecocritical text can be elusive . If one regards ecocriticism as examining the interconnections between the material world and human culture, then the range of topics that may figure as ecocritical include pastoralism, regionalism, agrarianism, feminism , science, and culture. Although the range of works that fall under the rubric ofecocriticism is broad, the efforts ofliterary environmentalists, thus Book Reviews107 far, have centered primarily on the non-fiction of such writers as Henry David Thoreau, Mary Austin, Edward Abbey, and Annie Dillard, to name a few. In the past decade, a wealth of articles has appeared in journals that consider how such writers depict nature and reflect or embrace ecological concepts.3 Examples of works regarded as ecocritical include Scott Slovic's Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing, which considers Thoreau, Dillard, Abbey, Barry Lopez, and Wendell Berry, and anthologies of nature writing such as Thomas J. Lyon's This Incomperable Lande, and The Norton Book ofNature Writing edited by Robert Finch and John Elder. The proliferation in recent years of nature writing has resulted in what Don Scheese calls a veritable "wilderness of books," which speak both to the popularity of nature writing and a concern with environmental issues (204). Recent additions to the body of work that might be classified as ecocritical include John P. O'Grady's Pilgrims to the Wild, Vera Norwood's Made From This Earth, and James I. McClintock's Nature's Kindred Spirits. McClintock focuses primarily on Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Gary Snyder as writers whose work exemplifies a "positive vision" of the way that human understandings of nature can be integrated with spiritual and social experiences. McClintock synthesizes the body of critical work surrounding the various writers to create more than a history of the nature essay or another analysis of American attitudes toward nature. He examines how each of the writers developed a positive vision inspired by Romantic ideas and an understanding of the biological sciences. McClintock unifies his discussion within the framework he defines in his opening chapter, "Kindred...

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