| This analysis of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century American literature focuses on works of fiction that illustrate a system of interconnected domination, one in which the oppression of the natural environment and marginalized human (and animal) groups are linked because they are perceived as potentially destabilizing forces. A close examination of rhetorical strategies in many of these texts reveal the creation of what I have termed environmental Others. The specters of cannibalism, seduction, and pollution become attributes of various landscapes, rendering them alien and, at times, threatening, and providing a justification for domination, much as the process of Othering functions between colonized populations and their colonizers in postcolonial theory. Additionally, the application of postcolonial ecocriticism reveals how acts of environmental trauma—such as deforestation, pollution, and soil exhaustion—create extensive cultural trauma for the marginalized groups. A survey of this literature reveals attempts both to affirm and resist such practices, as well as ways in which proprietary attitudes towards the environment and marginalized groups are related, growing out of their perceived relationships with the land.;Conversely, human members of marginalized groups are also rhetorically figured as part of non-human nature in order to fix their lower position in the social hierarchy of the new nation. However, members of these marginalized groups often challenge conventional boundaries between human and non-human nature in their writing, attempting to subvert the prevailing cultural structure that oppresses them. Similarly, animals in these texts function on both symbolic and physical levels, prompting writers to consider the role of non-human life forms in the new nation. Finally, I contextualize these works of fiction in the environmental history of the periods in which they were written. To that end, I focus on how the texts depict an ecology of settlement, revealing changes to a pre-existing ecological system created when settlers altered the areas they moved into. Attention to historical evidence of environmental trauma may demonstrate varying degrees of biocentric consciousness reflected in the works of fiction that I examine. |
