SOURCE: “Science and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century American Nature Literature,” in Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook, edited by Patrick D. Murphy, Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998, pp. 18-25.

In the following essay, Walls finds that the rise of nature literature is related to the hardening distinctions between science and literature, an issue that was of great significance to intellectuals in the nineteenth century.

Nineteenth-century science both created and constrained the possibilities for nature literature, making their relationship an uneasy one throughout the century. This was the Age of Science, as intellectuals then and since have styled it, and the general fascination with the emerging and rapidly changing sciences of astronomy, geology, the “new” geography, biology, chemistry, physics, anthropology and psychology opened a space for those writers, whether scientific or popular, who could interpret science for a popular audience and explain what the dazzling advances meant for “modern” life. The...