Drawing on theories of sublimity, trauma, and ecocriticism, this book examines how the often sharp division between European American and African American experiences of the natural world developed in American culture and history, and how those natural experiences, in turn, shaped the construction of race.

Autorentext
PAUL OUTKA is Assistant Professor of English, Florida State University. He has published essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. literature and culture with a particular focus on poetry, race, and the natural environment.

Inhalt
The Sublime and the Traumatic The Colonial Pastoral, Abolition, and the Transcendentalist Sublime 'Behold a man transformed into a brute': Slavery and Antebellum Nature Trauma, Postbellum Nostalgia, and the Lost Pastoral Trauma and Metamorphosis in Charles Chesnutt's Conjure Tales Strange Fruit White Flight Migrations