The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture by Lawrence Buell, and: Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques by Patrick D. Murphy (review)

180Rocky Mountain Review estimation, simplifies the dynamics of European exploration into the thesis that "if Europeans had stayed out of the New World, today it would remain a pristine land of native peoples living in harmony with nature" (xiii), they point out that no culture has yet devised a completely ecological sustainable existence, and they voice dissatisfaction with the supposition that Native Americans necessarily lived in a New World Garden of Eden. Instead of projecting contemporary anxieties about environmental crisis onto an idealized past as "Devil Theorists" might, the editors suggest that, as part of our own culture's struggle to come to ecological terms with its landscape, we take a different approach. Barclay, Maguire, and Wild suggest explicitly in their introduction to the Navajo narrative, and implicitly in the selections they've made for their anthology, that the myth of Wilderness, an awareness of the "blank spaces" on the map and of "unknown regions" in the world, teaches a necessary humility that our culture lacks. Wilderness teaches that humans cannot understand everything in nature, that rational inquiry, science, technology can only at best provide a "narrow paradigm" that fails to account for the wide mystery of the natural world (2). Thus, Into the Wilderness Dream suggests the possibility that Pierre Gaultier de La Vérendrye, weaving the mythology of hopeful Native Americans, trappers, and explorers into his geography of the regions west of the Great Lakes, may have been more than a man deluded by dreams of Empire. He may also have been a man compelled by a kind of environmental wonder—the "wilderness dream"—of which most citizens of the United States Eire no longer capable, and the loss of which diminishes our culture. This sense of wonder, reproduced in thirty-three different versions in the book, is a necessary attribute. The narratives collected in Into the Wilderness Dream will contribute not only to an understanding of the North American explorations of 1500-1805, but also to an understanding of the more factual, less "mythical" explorations of nature, wild and otherwise, that have continued into the present. DAVID TEAGUE University ofDelaware Parallel Program LAWRENCE BUELL. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995. 586 p. PATRICK D. MURPHY. Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. 256 p. G or scholars not yet familiar with the terms "ecocriticism" and "ecofeminism " and the body of work now being herded into conference presentations and scholarly publications under these banners, serviceable introductions are at hand. "'Ecocriticism,'" Lawrence Buell explains, "might succinctly be Book Reviews181 defined as study of the relation between literature and environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis" (430). Ecofeminism, on the other hand, in both theory and practice resists handy definitions. Patrick D. Murphy points out that ecofeminism has emerged as a complex knot of ecological theory and a wide variety of feminisms, and his book is an effort to establish a theoretical framework for conceptualizing an ecofeminist environmental analysis. "That method," he suggests, "is dialogics " (8). In a certain sense, pairing these books by Buell and Murphy makes for an odd couple: Buell's approach is literary and historical in the traditional sense, whereas Murphy's is highly theoretical and when it turns toward literary texts these tend to be non-canonical. Yet these volumes of literary criticism do share a partisan vision: that of rescuing the environment from what the authors believe are the unenlightened, degrading actions of human beings. As its subtitle suggests, The Environmental Imagination is an ambitious and formidable project, picking up the study of the American pastoral imagination where Leo Marx's classic Machine in the Garden (1964) leaves off. Using Henry David Thoreau as the benchmark to which he constantly returns , Buell takes his reader on excursions into a different literary territory than that revealed in the average college literature courses and anthologies. By privileging an "ecocentric" standard in literary texts, Buell sets out to redraw the literary map by not only including but elevating such figures as Susan Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, John Burroughs, Mary Hunter Austin, Rachel Carson...