Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction

Matthew J. C. Cella

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781587299070
• eBook ISBN: 9781587299391
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

At the core of this nuanced book is the question that ecocritics have been debating for decades: what is the relationship between aesthetics and activism, between art and community? By using a pastoral lens to examine ten fictional narratives that chronicle the dialogue between human culture and nonhuman nature on the Great Plains, Matthew Cella explores literary treatments of a succession of abrupt cultural transitions from the Euroamerican conquest of the "Indian wilderness" in the nineteenth century to the Buffalo Commons phenomenon in the twentieth. By charting the shifting meaning of land use and biocultural change in the region, he posits this bad land—the arid West—as a crucible for the development of the human imagination.

 Each chapter deals closely with two novels that chronicle the same crisis within the Plains community. Cella highlights, for example, how Willa Cather reconciles her persistent romanticism with a growing disillusionment about the future of rural Nebraska, how Tillie Olsen and Frederick Manfred approach the tragedy of the Dust Bowl with strikingly similar visions, and how Annie Proulx and Thomas King use the return of the buffalo as the centerpiece of a revised mythology of the Plains as a palimpsest defined by layers of change and response. By illuminating these fictional quests for wholeness on the Great Plains, Cella leads us to understand the intricate interdependency of people and the places they inhabit.

 Cella uses the term "pastoralism" in its broadest sense to mean a mode of thinking that probes the relationship between nature and culture: a discourse concerned with human engagement—material and nonmaterial—with the nonhuman community. In all ten novels discussed in this book, pastoral experience—the encounter with the Beautiful—leads to a renewed understanding of the integral connection between human and nonhuman communities. Propelling this tradition of bad land pastoralism are an underlying faith in the beauty of wholeness that comes from inhabiting a continuously changing biocultural landscape and a recognition of the inevitability of change. The power of story and language to shape the direction of that change gives literary pastoralism the potential to support an alternative series of ideals based not on escape but on stewardship: community, continuity, and commitment.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword by Wayne Franklin
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Biocultural Change and Literary Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction
• 1. (Un)settling the Indian Wilderness: Tribal Pastoralism in Cooper’s The Prairie and Welch’s Fools Crow
• 2. Pastoralism and Enclosure: Marriage and Illegitimate Children on the Range-FarmFrontierin Eaton’s Cattle and Richter’s Sea of Grass
• 3. Harmonious Fields and Wild Prairies: Transcendental Pastoralism in Willa Cather’s Nebraska Novels
• 4. Patches of Green and Fields of Dust: Dust Bowl Pastoralism in Olsen’s Yonnondio and Manfred’sThe Golden Bowl
• 5. Healing the Wounds of History: Buffalo Commons Pastoralism in Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Holeand King’s Truth and Bright Water
• Epilogue: Pastoral Art and the Beautiful
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index