When I was thirteen years old, my father took me to Gettysburg. It is my first recollection of my father’s growing passion for studying the history of the Civil War, which, I was only to realize long after his death, was his way of grappling with the unresolved horrors of his own experience as a battlefield medic. By escaping into the minutiae of a past and – at a distance – more heroic war, he had been probing his feelings about a war that he suspected (like Paul Fussell in Wartime, and Farley Mowat in And No Birds Sang) was dominated by ‘‘chickenshit’’ and pointless death. He was past sixty before he told me how terrified he had been, and how he had never stopped thinking and dreaming about what he had seen.

Nearly every handbook of critical theory acknowledges Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) to be the twentieth-century North American critic who was most ahead of his time. Yet he seems to have been so ambitious that we still do not know how to place him. Indeed, it would require the space of a whole book to trace the extensive but scarcely documented impact which he has had. Concepts for which many other critics became famous may be traced back to him: ‘‘the order of words’’ (Frye); ‘‘the rhetoric of fiction’’ (Booth); ‘‘blindness and insight’’ (De Man); ‘‘narrative as a socially symbolic act’’ (Jameson); ‘‘the anxiety of influence’’ (Bloom). Indeed, it may well be that very anxiety which has led so many contemporary critics to repress his memory. But there is a change in the critical climate, corresponding to the global. This article is written in the hope that Burke will shortly be recognized as the first critic systematically to analyse culture and literature from an ecological perspective. As the dating of our epigraph indicates, he initiated this project over half a century before the rise of ecocriticism in the United States. Moreover, this was no passing phase for him; his whole career may be understood as a profound experiment in green thinking.

Writing to Morton Zabel in 1932, Marianne Moore praised Zabel’s review of Emily Dickinson for Poetry magazine but also took the opportunity to remind her addressee that ‘‘Emily Dickinson cared about events that mattered to the nation.’’ In his review, Zabel had repeatedly insisted upon Dickinson’s ‘‘fast seclusion’’ from her community, locked as she was within an ‘‘asylum of the spirit.’’ This emphasis upon ‘‘isolation’’ and ‘‘introspection’’ represented the woman poet as being oddly detached from the ‘‘real’’ and implicitly masculine world of political and social change, a critical strategy Moore would have been all too familiar with, her own work having been repeatedly constructed in terms of aesthetic ‘‘purity.’’ Moore’s defence of Dickinson as a poet fully engaged with the political and social issues of her day is also, implicitly, a reminder to Zabel that women’s poetry need not be confined by critical interpretation to the private and feminized sphere of ‘‘introspection’’ but could be related to public affairs of national importance.

In 1970, Robert W. Peterson, the author of Only the Ball Was White, one of the first and most influential books on the Negro leagues, wrote: ‘‘Negro baseball was at once heroic and tawdry, a gladsome thing and a blot on America’s conscience.’’ When this appraisal was first made, every team in the Major Leagues had been ‘‘integrated’’ for at least ten years, and, as Peterson notes, ‘‘Negro baseball had virtually been forgotten.’’ This was perhaps willful on the part of many white people. At the time, Leroy ‘‘Satchel’’ Paige (1906–82) and Josh Gibson (1911–47) had neither been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame nor had they been transformed into national icons, and there was a general ignorance, even among most sports fans and scholars, about the Negro leagues.

On the morning of 4 August 1892, between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m., Abby Durfee Borden and Andrew Jackson Borden were murdered with an axe in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Why did the case spark so much interest at the time? Why did throngs of people literally block the street gawking at the Borden residence? Why did the country’s leading newspaper devour and report the daily happenings in this small New England town? Why, a century later, are ‘‘whodunit?’’ novels, plays, and films still being made about this gruesome double murder?

By the mid-1960s, American writer Kay Boyle was in possession of a three-book contract from Doubleday publishers in New York. The cornerstone of this deal was to be a history of Germany, a manuscript she began in the late 1950s. Boyle encountered difficulties completing this work, and after lobbying successfully to write a history of German women instead, she eventually abandoned the project altogether. To help her meet her professional obligations, Boyle hoped that Doubleday would accept a new plan to republish Three Short Novels, a work that had appeared under the Beacon imprint in 1958. That publisher still had four thousand copies of the book in its warehouse, however, and Doubleday editor Ken McCormick was unable to agree to Boyle’s proposal. McCormick suggested instead that she undertake work revising Robert McAlmon’s 1938 autobiography, Being Geniuses Together. Indeed, in the years following his death in 1956, Boyle had been unsuccessful in locating an American publisher for her friend’s book, so when Doubleday brought forward an edition of the work in 1968, it contained alternate chapters written by Kay Boyle, herself. McAlmon’s original text is approximately one hundred and ten thousand words in length; Boyle’s edition is one hundred and sixty thousand words, only seventy thousand of which were written by Robert McAlmon. ‘‘This present book is his,’’ Boyle wrote of McAlmon’s achievement in her 1984 afterword (333), and while one might argue that this is the case, no one can question the fact that his book was altered substantially from its original form.