SOURCE: Bennett, Michael. “Anti‐Pastoralism, Frederick Douglass, and the Nature of Slavery.” In Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, edited by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace, pp. 195‐209. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.

In the following essay, Bennett offers an ecocritical reading of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, arguing that the boundaries of the ecological must be expanded and that the dominant culture must take into account the perceptions of landscape by African‐Americans and not just by white writers who have tended to romanticize the wilderness.

If we separate the term “ecocriticism” into its two components, its parameters seem clear: “criticism,” engaging in analytical reading practices, and “ecological,” focusing these practices on environmental concerns. In theory, then, ecocriticism could be applied to any cultural artifact since every cultural text issues from, and envisions, a particular relationship with its environment. In practice, however...