Courses
“American Literature to 1915,” “American Literature and the American Environment,” “Space, Place, and Imagination,” “Shakespearean Tragedy,” “American Literature Now,” “U. S. Literary Emergence in the Nineteenth Century,” “Civil War Imagination,” “The Idea of the Great American Novel,” “American Transcendentalism,” “Melville,” “Faulkner,” “Whitman,” “The Practice of Autobiography,” “American Literary Emergence as a Transatlantic Phenomenon”

Research Interests
Rethinking U. S. Literature in a Globalizing World, Discourses of Literature and Environment, Theory of National Fiction, Transmutations of Genre in Anglophone Writing, Literature and/of Friendship

Books in Progress

A Cultural and Critical History of “The Great American Novel”

Environmental Autobiography as a Necessity of Life–and Ecological Survival

Previous Books

The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings. Modern Library, 2006.

The Future of Environmental Criticism. Blackwell, 2005.

Emerson. Harvard University Press, 2003. Christian Gauss Award for Literary Scholarship, Warren-Brooks
Award for Literary Criticism

Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the United States and
Beyond. Harvard University Press, 2001. American Culture Association Cawelti Prize for best book of year

in American culture studies

The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture.

Harvard University Press, 1995.

New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance. Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance. Cornell University Press, 1973.

Forthcoming Books, Articles, and Presentations

Shades of the Planet, ed. With Wai Chee Dimock (Princeton University Press, 2007)

“Religion, Environment, Literature, America”

“Literature as Environmental(ist) Thought Experiment”

“Mapping ‘Ecoterrorism'”

“Landscapes at the Edges of the World”

Selected Articles

“American Literary Globalism?” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 50: 1-22.

 “Saving Emerson for Posterity.” Emerson Bicentennial Essays. Ed. Joel Myerson and Ronald Bosco.

Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2006. Pp. 33-47.

“Downwardly Mobile for Conscience's Sake: Voluntary Simplicity from Thoreau to Lily Bart ” American Literary

History, 17 (Winter 2005): 653-655.

“Hawthorne and the Problem of ‘American' Fiction.” Hawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial Essays. Ed.

Millicent Bell. Ohio State University Press, 2005. pp. 70-87.

“Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Dream of the Great American Novel.” Cambridge Companion to Harriet

Beecher Stowe. Ed. Cindy Weinstein. Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. 190-202.

“Bondwoman Unbound: Hannah Crafts's Art and Nineteenth-Century U. S. Literary Practice.” In Search of

Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative . Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and

Hollis Robbins. New York: Basic/Civitas, 2004. Pp. 16-29.

“Rethinking Anglo-American Literary History,” Clio, 33, i (2003): 65-71.

“Theorizing the National in a Spirit of Due Reluctance,” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American

Literature, 19 (2003): 177-201.

“Emersonian Anti-Mentoring: From Thoreau to Dickinson and Beyond,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 41

(Summer 2002): 347-360.

“Postcolonial Anxiety in Classic U. S. Literature.” Postcolonial Theory in the United States: Race, Ethnicity,

and Literature. Ed. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt. University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Pp. 196-219.

(Revision of 1992 article.)

“The Ecocritical Insurgency,” New Literary History, 30 (Summer 1999): 699-712.

“American Civil War Poetry and the Meaning of Literary Commodification: Whitman, Melville, and Others.”

Reciprocal Influences: Literary Production, Distribution, and Consumption in America. Ed. Steven

Fink and Susan Williams. Ohio State University Press, 1999. Pp. 123-138.

“In Pursuit of Ethics,” PMLA, 114 (January 1999): 7-19.

“Toxic Discourse,” Critical Inquiry , 24 (Spring 1998): 639-665.

“Circling the Spheres: A Dialogue.” American Literature, special issue: “No More Separate Spheres.” Ed.

Cathy N. Davidson September 1998. Pp.465-490.

“The Rise and `Fall' of the Great American Novel,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 104

(October 1994): 261-283.

Last Updated: August 17, 2007