Imagining Rivers: the Aesthetics, History, and Politics of American Waterways. A Conversation Between Lawrence Buell and Christof Mauch

• Published in: Review of International American studies Vol. 14; no. 1; pp. 229 - 238
• Main Authors: Mauch, Christof, Buell, Lawrence
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Silesia Press 30.09.2021; Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
• Subjects: Aesthetics; American Literature; Energy and Environmental Studies; Environmental and Energy policy; Environmental Geography; Human Geography; Physical Geopgraphy; Theory of Literature; History and politics; North American literature; Christof Mauch; Environment; Lawrence Buell; American waterways; Watershed Aesthetics
• ISSN: 1991-2773; 1991-2773
• DOI: 10.31261/rias.10414

This contribution features a transatlantic conversation between Christof Mauch, environmental historian and Americanist from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and Lawrence Buell, literary scholar and ‘pioneer’ of ecocriticism from Harvard University. Buell’s The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995) marked the first major attempt to understand the green tradition of environmental writing, nonfiction as well as fiction, beginning in colonial times and continuing into the present day. With Thoreau’s Walden as a touchstone, this seminal book provided an account of the place of nature in the history of Western thought. Other highly acclaimed monographs include Writing for an Endangered World (2001), a book that brought industrialized and exurban landscapes into conversation with one other, and The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2009), which provides a critical survey of the ecocritical movement since the 1970s, with an eye to the future of the discipline.