is truly poetry of inclusion, stressing both his spirit
and body; by commemorating, rather than debasing
his physicality, Whitman marvels at the manner in
which matter only changes form, thereby ensuring
its survival, be it as human, grass, or dirt beneath
one’s boot soles. Henry David Thoreau took Whit-
man’s ebullience even further, specifically positing
the wilderness as savior by writing in his essay
“Walking” (1862) that “in wildness is the preserva-
tion of the world,” a sentiment that would come to
serve as a mantra for environmentalists.
The idealism of transcendentalism, however,
would last only until the time of the Civil War, as
national survival quickly advanced to the forefront
of public consciousness. Slave narratives penned
by Harriet Jacobs (incidents in the LiFe oF a
sLave GirL, written by herseLF) and Frederick
Douglass (narrative oF the LiFe oF Freder-
ick douGLass, an aMerican sLave), along with
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s uncLe toM’s cabin,
intensified the debate over slavery that threatened to
destroy the country. Yet amid all the politics of divi-
sion, the transcripts of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches
reveal a president concerned, first and foremost, with
the survival of the Union.
In 1890, the American frontier was declared
“closed,” thus effectively ending what had until then
been the country’s most enduring myth: that of the
West. Suddenly, the United States and her authors
had to acknowledge the philosophical significance
communicated by this spatial reality: There was,
indeed, no more second chance. What remained
was to turn back around and re examine the manner
in which the continent had been settled. Further-
more, the Industrial Revolution and its attendant
advances in transportation had shifted the Ameri-
can economy from agrarian to mechanized. This
phenomenon, along with tough economic times fol-
lowing the war, facilitated the rise of naturalists like
Theodore Dreiser (an aMerican traGedy) and
Stephen Crane (The open boat), whose writ-
ing highlighted the manner in which survival now
pertained more to getting along in bustling capitalist
metropolises than on sun-drenched prairies. Mod-
ernists sought solace with this increasingly unrec-
ognizable world. Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
and William Faulkner all wrote eulogistically of a
country they were not certain they really knew. Jack
Kerouac and Kurt Vonnegut followed suit. Post-
modernism interrogated what surviving in the 20th
century necessarily entailed.
Most recently, however, the ecocritical move-
ment, a critical literary approach aiming to treat
nature, according to the scholar David Mazel, as
if it were consequential has added further nuance
to survival’s role in literature. Citing environmental
degradation, including groundwater contamination,
overuse of pesticides, deforestation, pollution, and
global warming, authors (beginning ostensibly with
Rachel Carson in Silent Spring [1962] and still gain-
ing momentum from scholars like Glen Love) have
stressed the seemingly rudimentary concept that
the survival of literature—indeed, that of all art—is
integrally dependent on the survival of an environ-
ment able to sustain humanity itself. This basic
assumption refutes the postmodern maxim that
there are no absolutes, and it emphasizes that the
theme of survival in literature is a very fundamental
one; indeed, as people and texts are paralleled, they
share a similar fate.
See also Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451;
Defoe, Daniel: robinson crusoe; Dickens,
Charles: oLiver twist; Erdrich, Louise: Love
Medicine; tracks; Frank, Anne: anne Frank:
the diary oF a younG GirL; Golding, Wil-
liam: Lord oF the FLies; Gordimer, Nadine:
burGer’s dauGhter; Harte, Bret: “Outcasts
of Poker Flats, The”; Hemingway, Ernest:
FareweLL to arMs, a; Kingston, Maxine Hong:
woMan warrior, the; Mukherjee, Bharati:
MiddLeMan and other stories, the; O’Brien,
Tim: GoinG aFter cacciato; Solzhenitsyn,
Alexander: one day in the LiFe oF ivan den-
isovich; Steinbeck, John: pearL, the; Ten-
nyson, Alfred, Lord: in MeMoriaM a. h. h.;
Wright, Richard: native son.
FURTHER READING
Dailey, Kate. “Literature of Survival: A Literature Class
as a Place of Healing.” Teaching English in the Two-
Year College 34, no. 2 (December 2006): 196–201.
Mazel, David, ed. A Century of Early Ecocriticism. Ath-
ens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.
David Visser114 survival