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.
Authors and Novels Discussed
Willa Cather, O Pioneers! and A Lost Lady
James Fenimore Cooper, The Prairie
Winnifred Eaton, Cattle
Thomas King, Truth & Bright Water
Frederick Manfred, The Golden Bowl
Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio
Annie Proulx, That Old Ace in the Hole
Conrad Richter, Sea of Grass
James Welch, Fools Crow
“In the United States, the emigrant tale is a staple myth. Much of what Cella studies, from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie to Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! embodies that myth. It springs from the hope that life can take a turn for the better, that a person down on her luck can change her fate by changing her location. This is one of the deep stories of American culture. . . . It is not just a narrative—it is a promise, even a prophecy. . . . By reading the old stories so well, Matthew Cella helps us to imagine what those new ones might be.”—Wayne Franklin
“Matthew Cella offers an informative—and transformative—‘map of words’ for the Great Plains. It will appeal not only to scholars but to anyone seeking a new harmony between literary art and ecological responsibility in the grasslands. An inspiring, hope-filled journey.”—John T. Price, author, Not Just Any Land: A Personal and Literary Journey into the American Grasslands and Man Killed by Pheasant and Other Kinships
“Drawing on the rich body of literary and critical writing from the Great Plains, Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction offers sharp analyses of peoples in a demanding land. Focused on the region’s intertwined ecology, history, and cultures as found in its valorized texts, this book extends our understanding of the shaping of the unique North American literary environment stretching from Texas north to Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Matthew Cella imaginatively pairs texts from Cooper and Cather through to Annie Proulx, Thomas King, and James Welch in order to define a new pastoralism, one born of the ‘great facts’ of the Great Plains environment. Richly detailed and profoundly environmentally conscious, Cella’s study extends critical discussion of the region’s writing in ways acute, focused, and compelling.”—Robert Thacker, Charles A. Dana Professor of Canadian Studies and English, St. Lawrence University, and author, The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination
