ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that US American literature has been instrumental in creating the symbolic connection between manliness and nature. It demonstrates that the image of "hypermanhood in the wilderness" was carefully developed and reshaped throughout the centuries. Probably more than other literatures, American literary practice have generated strategies to incorporate codes of masculinity into the realm of nature. The chapter explores how approaches from ecocritical thought can be used to shed light on the literary nexus between manliness and the environment. It examines James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales and Harold Bell Wright's westerns as examples of this classical phase of masculinist appropriation of nature. The chapter illuminates how postmodernist literature has challenged and often deconstructed this traditional perspective, creating "eco-masculinity", namely an increased sense of awareness of the problematic dimensions of manliness. It argues that the paradigms of masculinity and wilderness are intimately conjoined in classical American literature.
