William Bartram Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Thomas Hallock

Critical Essay by Thomas Hallock

SOURCE: Hallock, Thomas. “‘On the Borders of a New World’: Ecology, Frontier Plots, and Imperial Elegy in William Bartram's Travels.” South Atlantic Review 66, no. 4 (fall 2001): 109-33.

In the following essay, Hallock traces the development of Bartram's Travels, noting its integration of contemporary artistic modes as well as its internal contradictions, and concludes by characterizing the work as one of America's first outstanding pastoral projects.

such attempts I leave for the amusement of men of Letters

—William Bartram¹

As the movement in any pastoral away from politics will draw politicized critiques, the Travels of William Bartram holds a characteristically ambivalent place in the canon of American pastoral literature. Viewed against the environmental writings of its day, the book provides a refreshing alternative to the usual rhetoric of expansion and usurpation, and critics can not discuss the author, it seems, without eventually broaching some form of ethical judgement. Bartram...
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