One hears a lot lately about the death of the humanities. Yet, as human beings face increasingly serious threats, not only to social and political institutions but also to our species’ very survival, the humanities and the critical lessons they teach are more essential than ever. A new generation of ecocritics is responding to this need by retooling their research to address insistent horrors such as climate change and ecological collapse. Specifically, they are revisiting the American canon in search of authors who can illuminate the genealogy of the current ecological crisis, even if those writers have not heretofore been recognized as “environmental.” Over the last decade and a half, for example, new research on Edgar Allan Poe has recast him as an ecological thinker, the guiding spirit of an alternative literary and intellectual environmentalist tradition more appropriate to our dark times than Ralph Waldo Emerson or even Henry David...
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