Abstract
Rachel Carson’s 1962 book The Silent Spring, perhaps the most influential work of environmental advocacy ever written, opens with a ‘Fable for Tomorrow’.1 She depicts a town completely at one with its pastoral surroundings:
Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of wildlife, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and autumn people travelled from great distances to observe them.2
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Notes
R. Carson (1962, 2000) The Silent Spring (New York: Penguin Classics), 21.
S. Sontag (1976) Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Octopus), 213.
S. Bercovitch (1996) The Cambridge History of American Literature (London: Cambridge University Press), 224.
Buell, XIV and XV. See also T.M. Disch (1975) The Ruins of Earth (London: Arrow Books).
L. Garforth (2005) ‘Green Utopias: Beyond Apocalypse, Progress and Pastoral’, Utopian Studies, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Winter 2005), 393–427.
T.J. Hillard (2009) ‘Deep into that Darkness Peering: An Essay on Gothic Nature’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Autumn 2009), 691.
S.C. Estok (2009) ‘Theorising in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Vol. 16, No. 2, 203–225.
F. Jennings (1975) The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W.W. Norton and Company), 33.
C. Simpson (2010) ‘Australian Eco-honor and Gaia’s Revenge: Animals, Eco-nationalism and the “New Nature”’, Studies in Australasian Cinema, Vol. 4, No. 1, 43–54.
R. Nash (1967) Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967; 1982), 28–9.
G. Garrard (2004) Ecocriticism (London: Routledge), 2.
E. Levy (1991) Small Town America in Film: The Decline and Fall of Community (New York, Continuum), 15.
C. Paglia (1991) The Birds (BFI Film Classics, London: BFI Publishing), 74.
F. Browswimmer (2001) Ecocide: A Short History of the Mass Extinction of Species (London: Pluto Press), 3.
See J. Muir (2002) Horror Films of the 1970s (North Carolina: McFarland).
J. Lemkin (1984) ‘Archetypal Landscapes and Jaws’ in B.K. Grant (ed.) Planks of Reason (New Jersey: Scarecrow Press), 279.
See D.J. Skal’s (1993) discussion of the trend in The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (London: Plexus).
W. Cronon (1996) ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, Environmental History, Vol. 1. No. 1, 15.
J.G. Blair and A. Trowbridge (1960) ‘Thoreau on Katahdin’, American Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Winter 1960), 508–517.
B. Schulman (2002) The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics (Boston: Da Capo Press), 30.
W.S. Poole (2011) Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (Waco: Baylor University Press), 117.
B. McKibben (2006) The End of Nature: Humanity, Climate Change and the Natural World (New York: Random House), 105.
M. Lindstrom (2011) (ed.) Encyclopaedia of the U.S. Government and the Environment: History, Policy and Politics, Vol. 1: Essays and Entries A–I (Santa Barbara: ABC Clio).
T. Frentz and T. Rosteck (2009) ‘Myth and Multiple Readings in Environmental Rhetoric: The Case of An Inconvenient Truth’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 95: 7
J.M. Conrad and K. Kotani (2005) ‘When to Drill? Trigger Prices for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’, Resource and Energy Economics, Vol. 27, No. 4, 273–286.
M. Kotchen, M.J. Burger, and E. Nicholas (2007) ‘Should We Drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? An Economic Perspective’, Energy Policy, Vol. 35, No. 9 (September), 4720–4729.
P.N. Carroll (1969) Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629–1700 (New York: Columbia University Press), 11.
C. Carlsson (2002) ‘La forét précède l’homme, le désert le suit’, Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Défiant Celebration (San Francisco: AK Press), 23.
J. London (1912) ‘The Scarlet Plague’ in The Scarlet Plague and Other Stories (Dover: N.H. Pocket Classics), 1.
G.R. Stewart (1949, 1999) Earth Abides (London: Gollancz), 8.
A. Wiseman (2007) The World without Us (London: Virgin), 4.
C.B. Brown (1799, 1998) ‘To the Public’ in Edgar Huntly: Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (London: Penguin Books), 3.
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© 2013 Bernice M. Murphy
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Murphy, B.M. (2013). ‘Why Wouldn’t the Wilderness Fight Us?’ American Eco-Horror and the Apocalypse. In: The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137353726_6
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