ABSTRACT

American environmental fiction went into a period of dormancy until the end of the nineteenth century, when Realism/Naturalism began to gain a foothold on the literary marketplace. The advent of Transcendentalist-influenced nature writing often presented the author as a kind of solitary environmental prophet. Rural Hours represented something of a passing of the environmental torch, not so much from father to daughter as from fiction to nonfiction, and from a national to regional scale. James Fenimore Cooper, concerns himself with matters of an ambitiously national scale. American writers increasingly turned to fiction to make sense of an environment that seemed, like the God of Cooper's The Crater, to be punishing them as much for their socio-political failings as for their failure to act as responsible stewards of the land. James Fenimore Cooper was again associated with the publication of an influential work of environmental literature.