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Book Review
| Literature of Place: Dwelling on the Land before Earth Day 1970. By Melanie L. Simo. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. xv + 271 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Cloth $39.50.
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| In Literature of Place, Melanie Simo focuses on American literary representations of place from 1890 to 1970, a period she describes as "bracketed by an awareness of frontiers" (p. x). While the final decade of the nineteenth century is famously associated with the closing of America's western frontier, Simo notes that the lunar landing in 1969 and the first Earth Day in 1970 signaled new frontiers of environmental awareness. Literature of Place, a sort of sequel to Simo's 2003 book Forest and Garden: Traces of Wildness in a Modernizing Land, 1897–1949, examines the 1890–1970 period through a wide lens, considering place in its broadest connotations: wilderness, park, farm, garden, city, neighborhood. Her concern is not with a single kind of landscape, but rather with how writers perceived and represented their relationships to American places during a tumultuous period in which places and cultural practices of place engagement were being radically transformed. |
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Literature of Place employs an innovative structure in approaching its broad subject. The first of the book's two main sections, "The Region," is divided into chapters surveying examples of place-based writing from New England, the Southern Highlands, the Pacific Coast, the Arid West, and what she calls "The Heart of the Country" (an odd fit, because this chapter focuses more on agricultural literature than on the Midwest as a region). Because each chapter might easily have been a book in itself, the coverage here is necessarily reduced to a survey that demonstrates both the benefits and the costs that such an approach entails. The strength of these chapters is the helpful snapshot they provide of the place-based literatures of certain regions during the 1890–1970 period, and Simo has included interesting discussions of lesser-known as well as canonical writers from each region. The weakness is that the brevity of the treatment prevents the chapters from offering the well-developed, richly problematized analysis that regions and their representative literatures require and deserve. |
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More successful is the second of the book's main sections, "The Domain," which includes often fascinating chapters on "The Small Place and the Little Garden," "The Abandoned Place," "The Reinhabited Place," "The Lost Place," and "The Explored Place." Here, too, the methodology is more descriptive than analytical, and the approach again relies upon survey. Nevertheless, such heuristic categories as "abandoned," "reinhabited," and "lost" can inspire careful rethinking of the multi-dimensional implications of the larger category of "place," and Simo has done a superb job using these abstractions to map specific ways in which Americans living during the period under study struggled to define, maintain, enrich, or recover their relationship to place. |
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Melanie Simo's prose is admirably accessible and well informed throughout Literature of Place, and her innovative look at the "domain" in the book's second half offers a satisfying account of how Americans conceived, manipulated, and expressed place during a period in which radical cultural and environmental changes repeatedly transformed and sometimes severed intimate connections to places of all kinds. |
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Michael P. Branch is professor of literature and environment and director of graduate studies in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno. His most recent book is Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing before Walden (Georgia, 2004). |
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