The Literature of Nature: The British and American Traditions ed. by Robert J. Begiebing, Owen Grumbling (1994)

282 Western American Literature border between scientific and literary discourse in the nineteenth century. The concluding discussion of Mary Austin explains her central concern for the “land’s effect upon the human individual and community.”Although he avoids using explicit ecofeminist rhetoric, O ’Grady illuminates Austin’s own protoecofeminist perspective. Pilgrims to the Wild is a book that deftly and clearly reveals the biographical and historical contexts of some of the most important American wilderness writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This important new book shows the value of scholarship—ecocriticism—that is fully engaged with literary texts and at the same time attuned to the complexities of the human mind, social relationships, and the nonhuman world. SCOTT SLOVIC Southwest Texas State University The Literature ofNature: The British and American Traditions. Edited by RobertJ. Begiebing and Owen Grumbling. (Medford, New Jersey: Plexus Publishing, 1990. 730 pages, $37.50.) Having once lamented the dearth of nature writing anthologies, scholars of literature and the environment now find themselves awash in a sea of collec­ tions, remarkably various in scope and quality. An addition to the latest wave of such books is The Literature of Nature, a large volume that seeks to represent British and American nature writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book is divided into five chronologically arranged sections (although the British and American authors are not combined within sections), and includes headnotes for each author and introductions to each section. The virtues of The Literature ofNature are inextricable from its faults, faults usually attributable to the book’s remarkably wide focus. On the one hand, the book manages to get a selection of British and American nature writers between the same covers; on the other, it does little to help us understand why these traditions are bedfellows in the first place. The book’s selections remind us that canonical authors such as Blake, Whitman, Hardy, and Faulkner have a place in the nature writing tradition, but the editors’ attempt “to validate the existence of the British and American canons [of nature literature] ”has often been made at the expense of important authors whose omission is troublesome. This canonical bias is reflected in the fact that only four of the fifty authors included are women and none are Native American. The wide scope of the chapter introductions provides a prolegomenon for readers unfamiliar with nature writing; however, the very breadth of these essays often defeats their purpose, as when American Transcendentalism is dispensed with in less than a page. The section on “The Background of Nature Literature”includes introductory essays on the Greek and Roman worlds, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, and thus gives some sense of the evolution of Western attitudes toward nonhuman nature. Unfortunately, the extreme brevity of the essays Reviews 283 (about sixpages each) sometimesforces dangerouslyreductive generalizations. While the editors’introductions demonstrate familiaritywith major scholarship in the area ofliterature and the environment, theirbook’sgenerality—aswell as its lack of a bibliography and index—prevents it from being a substantial contribution to that scholarship. The Literature ofNature does fill a particular niche in the current field of anthologies, but readers will want to identify that niche very carefully. The extensive introductory and bibliographical materials of Thomas Lyon’s This IncomperableLande (1989) make it a better choice for those interested primarily in American nature writing. Readers whose focus is nature poetry will want to look at Christopher Merrill’s TheForgotten Language (1991) or Robert Pack and Jay Parini’sPoemsfor a SmallPlanet (1993). Those wishing to read contemporary nature writing should try Peter Sauer’s Finding Home (1992), John Murray’s Nature’s New Voices (1992), or Thomas Lyon and Peter Stine’s On Nature’s Terms (1992). Students of nature writing by women will do better with Lorraine Anderson’s Sisters of the Earth (1991) or Karen Knowles’s Celebrating the Land (1992). Teachers planning to bring the literature ofnature to the composition classroom will prefer Scott Slovic and Terrell Dixon’sBeing in the World (1993). Readers most concerned about the representative environmental writing of a particular region or bioregion are advised to seek out one of the spate of new regional...