“The Base, Cursed Thing”: Panther Attacks, Ecotones, and Antebellum American Fiction

Authors

  • Matthew Wynn Sivils

Keywords:

panthers, ecotones, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Charles Brockden Brown

Abstract

The panther attack scenes found in the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), and Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835-1921) portray these animals as literary monsters indicative of a developing American environmental anxiety. Drawing on a selection of recent critical studies dealing with both antebellum American fiction and ecocriticism, I suggest that these scenes reveal, especially through their depiction of panther attacks in what ecologists now refer to as anthropogenic ecotones (human-made environmental edges), the beginnings of an American cultural recognition of environmental degradation. Ultimately these panther attack scenes prefigure an American environmental ethic, revealing an instructive early stage in the evolving cultural perception of the human devastation to the natural world.

Author Biography

Matthew Wynn Sivils

Formerly a wildlife biologist, Matthew Wynn Sivils is now an assistant professor of English at Iowa State University where he teaches courses on nineteenth-century American literature and environmental literature. He has published articles on writers such as Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, William Bartram, William Faulkner, and Willa Cather.

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Published

2010-01-05

How to Cite

Sivils, M. W. (2010). “The Base, Cursed Thing”: Panther Attacks, Ecotones, and Antebellum American Fiction. Journal of Ecocriticism, 2(1), 19–32. Retrieved from https://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/joe/article/view/131

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Articles