SOURCE: Branch, Michael. “Indexing American Possibilities: The Natural History Writing of Bartram, Wilson, and Audubon.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, pp. 282‐97. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Branch surveys the evolution of ideas about nature before the nineteenth century and goes on to discuss the contributions by three important nineteenth‐century American naturalists whose thematic concerns became central to subsequent environmental literature.

During the half‐century between the publication of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) and Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature (1836), American natural history was a flourishing discipline that helped nurture the emergence of a culture distinctively contingent upon the land.¹ This period, which I identify as “early romantic,” has received little attention from ecocritics, who more often focus upon Henry Thoreau and his literary descendants—a distinguished lineage that includes figures such...