Content area
Abstract
The interior temperate grasslands of North America, commonly known as the prairie, were the largest ecologically continuous area of land absorbed by US settler empire. Lives of Grass revisits the literary, cultural, and environmental history of the prairie in the age of settler colonial expansion. As the landscape began to register in Anglo-American writing around the turn of the nineteenth century, the figure of the prairie concentrated a set of problems having to do with scale and environmental perception, colonial violence, ecological devastation, and aesthetic form. This dissertation traces the formation of the prairie as a biome alongside its formation as a textual image. It asks how the territory became legible and appropriable for a variety of settler interests, and how literary works like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie (1827) navigated the terrain between topography and political economy. Running through the dissertation is a set of methodological questions addressed at the possible points of conjuncture among literary studies, environmental history, perceptual ecology, and settler colonial studies. The study concludes with a discussion of figurative language, embodiment, belatedness, and the task of critique.
