Beginning with Emily Dickinson’s circumscribed view of her environment, the book introduces readers to the sciences, technologies, and aesthetics of vision that inform a natural history of casualty. The nineteenth century’s declensionist narratives of species, race, and nature corresponds to narratives of a Euro-American expansion of civilization across the American continent. Dickinson’s techniques of seeing comprise what is theorized as a “sketch.” Through a feminist lens influenced by the new materialist turn in ecocriticism, the sketch is defined as an optical-textual apparatus that materially engages with the environment and that apprehends the fragile tenuousness of ecological relation. The chapter positions the sketch as a minor and partial view of nature against the dominant wide-sweeping historical romance of exploration, empire, and nation. Using Harriet Jacobs’s “loophole of retreat” as an example, the chapter lays out the ecological and epistemological stakes of critical sketches whose engagement with the discourse of declining natures nevertheless opens out to a view of their survival based upon precarious environmental relations. Reflecting the sketch’s partiality back onto literary critical methodologies, “partial reading” is proposed as a method that situates its own epistemological limits as an apprehension of the casualties produced by historicizing gestures.

The Afterword begins by reflecting on the form of ecological relation that has been sketched out in the preceding chapters through animating figures of species like the passenger pigeon, coral, or seaweed. These relations are based on a material and metaphorical transport from one to another that joins but also keeps apart. Taking up this conjunctive and disjunctive as a figure of partial relations, the afterword moves on to consider how this defines how things come to matter or mean to one another, whether at the close-reading scale of linguistic significance, at the scale of relations between the fields of literature and science, or at the scale of interspecies figuration. Ending with a reminder of contemporary anthropogenic environmental change, the book concludes by observing the tensions of romantic holism and partial ecology that continue to beset strategies for the survival of species like coral.