Book reviews -- The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture by Lawrence Buell

The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. By Lawrence Buell. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. xii, 586 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-674-25861-4.)

In The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell begins by focusing on the paradox of an American literary history that sees the centrality of writing about "the natural environment...while marginalizing the literature devoted most specifically to it and reading the canonical books in ways that minimize their interest in representing the environment as such." Much of Buell's study examines that literature, bringing it before us not simply to illuminate canonical works, although he sometimes does this, but to explore a genre worthy in itself. At the same time he centrally positions that most canonical of American "environmental" texts, Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854).

The result...