TY - JOUR
AU - Ronda, Margaret
AB - Juliana Chow’s insightful and textured new book considers how a series of literary figures across the nineteenth century developed practices of natural history that emphasized partial rather than totalizing or holistic perspectives. Like recent books by Monique Allewaert, Cristin Ellis, and Britt Rusert, Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History offers sustained insights into the relation between nineteenth-century discourses of natural history, biogeography, and race, focusing particular attention to the ways literary texts materialize these discourses through metaphor and figure. Contrasting what she calls “romantic holism” and associated epistemologies of scientific knowledge with the more limited and evanescent epistemological modes of writers such as Emily Dickinson, Harriet Jacobs, John James Audubon, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Simon Pokagon, James McCune Smith, and Henry David Thoreau, Chow argues that these writers’ deliberately partial approaches generate attention to questions of survival, loss, and transience. Connected by a materialist approach that considers forms of environmental transformation (extinction, species loss, geographical alterations), their texts generate ways of looking that attend to matter in its mutable and fugitive forms. Chow places these works, which she calls “natural history sketches,” in the context of a broader mid-nineteenth century turn to biogeography, highlighting how they resist more dominant accounts of “species, race, development, and human civilization” that serve to naturalize regimes of racial inequality and violence (27). Chow’s text draws welcome attention to alternative empiricisms within the literature of science from this period. She makes an important case, in particular, for works by Anishinaabe writer Simon Pokagon and Black physician and intellectual James McCune Smith as illuminating the racial implications of scientific discourses of evolutionary succession and species extinction and offering other vantages attuned to precarity and resilience. Chow argues that Pokagon’s writings reframe discourses of Native vanishing and extinction, particularly of the decline of the passenger pigeon. Reading Pokagon’s birch bark pamphlets as a “material metaphor” for relations between Anishinaabe and their environment, Chow argues that this sketch form becomes a means of inscribing loss and survival across species. In another chapter, Chow incisively describes how McCune Smith develops a line of thinking about the dispersal of human species across geographies that is grounded in an imaginative engagement with the living matter of coral. For McCune Smith, coral becomes an important means of understanding interchange between civilizations over time and the dynamics of racial uplift. Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History elaborates an original method of partiality in relation to environmental seeing, knowing, and representing. Reading this “sketch mode” across various texts as a “‘sketchy’ way of seeing—partially, incompletely, transitorily, or diffusely”—Chow argues that such approaches can be understood as textual enactments of “nature’s diminishment” (36). Through her nuanced consideration of the sketch as a modal rather than generic orientation that registers the ecological forms and meanings of partial vantages, Chow makes a convincing case about the significance of reading for partiality as an ecocritical endeavor. To attend to materials and relations that remain fragile and diminished, Chow suggests, is to cultivate sustained attunement to the transformational properties and the forms of violence that comprise ecological existence for both nonhumans and humans. Chow’s study provides a lucid and valuable model for such ecocritical vantages. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History. By Juliana Chow
JO - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isac045
DA - 2022-07-11
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/nineteenth-century-american-literature-and-the-discourse-of-natural-93jobSC3c2
SP - 944
EP - 946
VL - 29
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -