textThis project traces the history of the production and reception of American
nature writing between 1860 and 1909. It diverges from contemporary approaches to
the genre by examining the essays of John Burroughs, John Muir, and their peers not as
records of heartfelt encounters with the natural world, but rather as works that were
written, published, and sold for profit, and that reached readers only after having passed
through the book and magazine trades. By taking this unorthodox approach, I revise
commonly held assumptions about the nature writing’s emergence at the end of the
nineteenth century. First, I challenge the notion that the genre became an increasingly
prominent feature in American literary culture primarily because readers were
concerned about the natural world. Building on recent work by Lawrence Buell, I show
that nature writing emerged also through the efforts of several elite literary institutions
whose influence strongly determined its form, its audience, and the cultural capital it
represented. Second, I show that Burroughs, not Henry David Thoreau, was the
instrumental figure in the genre’s history before 1900. Only as Burroughs gained
national prominence in the 1870s and 1880s did the importance of both Thoreau and
nature writing become increasingly well defined. Finally, I show that nature writing has
played a more varied and significant role in American literary culture than is generally
assumed. At the turn of the twentieth century, the genre participated in numerous and
sometimes conflicting cultural discourses: not only the emergence of the conservation
movement, but also the reification of what Santayana termed the “genteel tradition,” the
emergence of a decidedly middlebrow culture, the articulation of New England’s
regional identity, and the definition of a generally “American” identity that purported to
speak for all parts of the expanding nation. The internal contradictions are obvious; their
existence is hardly surprising. Then, as now, nature writing served a range of people
and institutions in multiple ways.Englis