Narrating Discovery: The Romantic Explorer in American Literature, 1790–1855 by Bruce Greenfield (review)

Book Reviews 183 Readers will find some strong and provocative language in this book, for Lessoff's indictment of urban self-government includes the visionless influence that we call machine politics, the tendency of taxpayers to resist even the most useful capital expenditures, the intermittent anti-city biases displayed by rural-dominated state legislatures, and the resistance of the independent suburbs to metropolitan coordination. (272) His forays into comparative urban history are no less controversial. "While the cities of other industrial, capitalist countries certainly face severe problems," he writes, "they have survived war, dictatorship, and the breakup of empires better than American cities have weathered industrial prosperity, the rise to world power, and stable popular government" (272). The Nation is a humane and searching book which engages some of the grandest political themes in the making of modern urban society. It is well researched and lucidly written, and if the reader has to struggle at times to master the immense amount of detail presented by the author, the effort is well worth it. Bruce Tucker University olWindsor Bruce Greenfield. Narrating Discouery: The Romantic Explorer in American Literature, 1790-1855. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Pp. 249 and index. Bruce Greenfield's Nt.1rrati11g Discovery theorizes an explanation for the profoundly personal response to nature and to the American landscape that 1s voiced by many nineteenth-century American authors. Greenfield's readings of Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allen Poe, and Henry David Thoreau are persuasive and insightful. But the real significance of Nam1ting Discouery lies in the path that leads Greenfield to his interpretations, not in the readings themselves. And the construction of that "path" constitutes the greater part of the book. In fact, Nt1rrt1ti11g 184 Canadian Review of American Studze.s Discovery is well into its second half before it shifts attention to the mainstream authors of the American Renaissance. Greenfield shapes a tradition that he sees beginning with the fur trade accounts of Samuel Hearne, Alexander MacKenzie, and Alexander Henry, and moving through the distinctly American exploration narratives of Lewis and Clark, Zebulon Pike, and Charles Fremont. He identifies an imperialist ethos in the earliest and British manifestations of that tradition, an ethos that swells to even greater proportions in the later work of American explorers. Greenfield then argues that the romantic responses to nature characteristic of Irving, Cooper, Poe, and Thoreau grew out of those writers' discomfort with the colonial discourses they had inherited. Thus, their personal responses to nature and landscape were a reaction against an unsettling American imperialism, reflected in the writings of Lewis and Clark, Pike, and Fremont. While Narrating Discovery is published in the United States and, for the most part, concerns itself with American writers, it is a significant event in Canadian Studies. If I am correct, the author was born in Canada, received much of his education here, and currently teaches at a Canadian university. Were it to accomplish nothing more, Greenfield's work demonstrates how much the study of literature has changed in Canada since 1965, when Northrop Frye wrote, in his influential "Conclusion" to The Literary History of Canadi, (Carl Klinck, ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press), that the writing of early explorers was "as innocent of literary intention as a mating loon" (822). Today, some three decades later, a Canadian academic has constructed a cogent reading of early American literature and culture almost wholly through his interpretation of the records left by explorers and traders. Unlike Frye, Greenfield sees the explorers' records as complex combinations of narrative strategies developed by the explorer-author to "situate his individual actions in a national history" (26). That roughly one-third of the book addresses the work of men who were engaged in constructing a discourse about pre-Confederation Canada (and not pre-Revolution America) lends even greater relevance to Canadian Studies. To debate what was American and what was Canadian prior to 1776 and 1867 is perhaps without purpose, and Greenfield hardly troubles himself with such matters. The first third of Nlltrating Discot•ery addresses the accounts of British explorers in North America, and the next third addresses American explorers. Yet the distinctions that Greenfield draws between their accounts...