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Book Review
| Essays on Nature and Landscape. By Susan Fenimore Cooper. Edited by Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. xxxiv + 131 pp. Notes, index. Cloth $45.00, paper $19.95.
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| Susan Fenimore Cooper, daughter of James Fenimore Cooper, wrote and published a novel, essays, and family memoirs in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Well-educated, proficient in four languages, and a keen observer, Cooper used rural and natural history themes for much of her work. Her best known book, Rural Hours, describing a year of life in the Otsego Lake region of New York and originally published in 1850, went through many reprintings; she also published revised editions in 1868 and 1887. Recently, environmental historians and scholars looking at American nature writing have turned again to Cooper's work. Johnson and Patterson, both English professors, edited a new unabridged edition of Rural Hours (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998) and some of Cooper's other writings as well as Essays on Nature and Landscape. |
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Essays contains a delightful collection of varied Cooper writings beginning with "A Dissolving View," published by George Putman in The Home Book of the Picturesque in 1852 and ending with "A Lament for the Birds," published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1893. In her early work, using colorful, descriptive language, Cooper painted pictures of rural American landscapes which, she believed, man had improved by careful use. Contrasting American landscapes with those of other parts of the world, she praised the remaining monuments of western civilization, while suggesting an American landscape aesthetic based on stewardship to sustain human presence without depleting resources. She emphasized the importance of observation and of distinguishing between American and European species that, though related, were not the same. She also suggested that in America the intellectual could flourish in a rural setting, studying and appreciating divinely inspired creation. In the years after the Civil War, she became increasingly concerned about changes in rural landscapes, deploring the environmental degradation which railroads brought and the effects of over-hunting and other human activities on numbers of bird and other animal species. She called for education designed to prepare Americans to lead worthy lives and hoped for village societies to maintain rural community values while improving public facilities during times of growth and expansion. All of those themes are present in Essays. Her concerns remain valid today, and her clear descriptions make her work delightful reading. |
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The editors point out that Cooper idealized American rural life and called for a human society based on sustaining the environment. They chose selections carefully to illustrate aspects of Cooper's environmental thought and arranged those selections in chronological order to show the development of Cooper's ideas. The editors discuss the selections in an introduction and include editorial changes and textual notes in a separate section of the book, but they printed the essays themselves without comment or bibliographic information. Thus, the reader has to dig to find the source of each selection. Printing the bibliographic information with each selection would have improved the book. However, Essays is an excellent collection of Cooper's work and recommended reading for environmental historians and those interested in nature writing. |
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Sylvia W. McGrath is chair of the department of history at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. She has published in history of American science and history of women and continues research in those areas. |
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