Shades of Green : Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770-1860

by Finseth, Ian Frederick

• ISBN13: 9780820328652
• ISBN10: 0820328650
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-01-15
• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr

Summary

Shades of Greenoffers a creative reimagining of early and antebellum American literary culture by exploring the complex web of relationships linking racial thought to natural science and natural imagery. The book charts a dynamic shift in both polemical and imaginative literature during the century before the Civil War, as scientific, artistic, and spiritual vocabularies regarding "nature" became increasingly important for authors seeking to mobilize public opinion against slavery or to redefine racial identity. Finseth argues that these vocabularies both liberated and constrained antislavery philosophy and, more broadly, that our understanding of race in early American literature must take the natural world into account. In doing this, Finseth fuses a cultural history of the period with fresh readings of such major figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass.Drawing on a range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, including aesthetics, anthropology, phenomenology, and ecocriticism,Shades of Greendemonstrates the agility with which human thought about the natural and the racial leapt across formal epistemological, professional, and artistic boundaries. In this innovative account, the politics of race and slavery are shown to have been deeply intertwined with putatively apolitical cultural understandings of the natural world. The book will be of value to scholars in a variety of disciplines, including American studies, African American literary history, and environmental philosophy.

Author Biography

Ian Frederick Finseth is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Texas. He is the editor of The American Civil War: An Anthology of Essential Writings.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Nature, Race, Culture	p. 1
Nature, Civilization, and the Progress of Antislavery Philosophy	p. 29
Natural Science in Early Antislavery Thought	p. 33
Natural Aesthetics in Early Antislavery Literature	p. 50
Narrative, Temporality, and the International Traveler	p. 74
Crevecoeur's Natural Contract	p. 78
Olaudah Equiano and the Paradox of History	p. 97
Natural Evil and Human Development	p. 118
The Problem of Theodicy	p. 120
Antebellum Natural Science	p. 133
The Natural Law of Free Development	p. 144
Nations of Blood	p. 162
The Separatist Impulse, from David Walker to Martin Delany	p. 165
Of Men and Mollusks: Emerson's Providential Biology	p. 187
Race in the Landscape	p. 207
Pastoral, Race, and the Visual Imagination	p. 210
Toward an African American Georgic	p. 229
Coda: Antislavery Pictorialism	p. 245
Revisiting, Reliving, Reforming	p. 250
The Geography of the Slave Narrative	p. 253
From the Garden to the Swamp: Harriet Beecher Stowe	p. 261
Oxen and Sweet Potatoes: Douglass on the Land	p. 271
Epilogue: Shadows of Green	p. 292
Notes	p. 299
Index	p. 341
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