SOURCE: Anderson, Douglas. “Bartman's Travels and the Politics of Nature.” Early American Literature 25, no. 1, (1990): 3-17.

In the following essay, Anderson examines the lessons Bartram attempts to teach his reader in Travels, lessons that nature can teach society about its social and political organization.

William Bartram's Travels (1791), like so many of the most interesting products of the Anglo-American sensibility in the eighteenth century, challenges the reader's capacities of adjustment. It presents itself at various times as a travel journal, a naturalist's notebook, a moral and religious effusion, an ethnographic essay, and a polemic on behalf of the cultural institutions and the rights of American Indians—a range of modes and interests that has led William Hedges to describe the Travels as “the most astounding verbal artifact of the early republic.”¹ This mixture of discourses is already sufficiently rich to invite the quite different critical approaches brought to Bartram's work...