TY - JOUR
AU - Parks, Cecily
AB - CECILY PARKS The Secret Swamps in Susan Howe's Secret History of the Dividing Line, Thorow, and Personal Narrative Early American colonial ordinances gave the swamp value equal to that of waste grounds for human refuse because of its uninhabitable and uncultivatable status (Stilgoe 44). Until the mid-twentieth century, American swamps were eradicated: drained and converted into stable land that could be built upon. Only recently have swamps become conservationists' darlings, through a transformation that has involved yet another erasure: the erasure of the word swamp. Substituting the term wetlands for swamp, environmental advocates have obtained support for these historically maligned places. This transition has not gone unnoticed by ecocritics such as Lawrence Buell, who coins the term “wetlands aesthetics” in a book review, claiming that the name change represents an aesthetic revolution. He asks, “How do you turn a ‘swamp’ into a ‘wetland’? It requires . . . a revolution in values, especially in aesthetics . . . for such places to become reunderstood as places of value and even beauty” (670–71). Buell cites Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Seamus Heaney as participants in the formation of a wetlands aesthetics that reenvisions and celebrates once-wasteland wetland places. An 
TI - The Secret Swamps in Susan Howe's Secret History of the Dividing Line, Thorow, and Personal Narrative
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isu051
DA - 2014-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-secret-swamps-in-susan-howe-s-secret-history-of-the-dividing-line-Edg5mKluTp
SP - 353
EP - 373
VL - 21
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -