This study explores the social and cultural origins and significance of an American tradition of written response to nature, which I label "environmental romanticism." Beginning my study with the earliest European discovery narratives, I argue that in addition to being a physical entity, "nature" was a construct of the early American colonizing mentality--the "other" of the human--against which the colonizers acted out their agendas of conquest deriving from ethnocentric and anthropocentric cultural imperatives. During the eighteenth century, with the rise of pastoralism and romanticism, writers of discovery narratives, such as William Bartram in his Travels ... (1791), adapted the form to more personal uses, and a private voice of ambivalence over the Euro-American response to human and non-human nature appeared beneath the public discourses of economics and science. When Thoreau adapted the discovery narrative form in Walden (1854), the rhetoric of dissent was no longer imbedded in the subtext, but became a primary purpose of the genre. Scientific developments after the turn of the century, such as the growing popularity of Darwinism and the appearance of the science of ecology, served to complicate rather than clarify the debate that Thoreau initiated about how nature can help to reform society. I examine texts by John Muir, Mary Austin, Henry Beston, Sally Carrighar, Aldo Leopold, Loren Eiseley, and Annie Dillard that emulate the achievement of Thoreau to advance their personal histories in support of social and environmental reform. As all the texts demonstrate, the writers struggle against the race- and gender-based "dualism" of their Eurocentric heritages that seeks to make "nature" separate from humanity. In the history of the environmental romance can be traced the ideological development of an American ecological consciousness. They search for alternatives to socially constructed uses of nature in order to defend "wildness," in which, Thoreau wrote, lies hope for the "preservation of the world."
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