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My study utilizes ecocriticism, eco-Marxism, and posthumanism to discover how the sympathetic practices of both reading and ecology provide us with what I call an oiko-logic. Specifically, I read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing. In Gulliver’s Travels we see Gulliver as an ecological threat in every journey, and Swift says that this is because we forget ourselves and deliberately choose to not attune—sometimes even choosing destruction. For Swift, we bungle things no matter which system we try, and we create degenerative devolution despite the fact that we can help. Sterne’s fundamental ecological question is how people and the entities they dwell with (living and non-living) have real interactions—which means considering domestication’s bilateralism. Humans and animals can interact beneficently in Sterne’s work, and individualism becomes oiko-logically untenable since calculations of value and affordability must include others. In Moby-Dick the whale’s values are more moral than Ahab’s, and through comparisons available in the text of Moby-Dick we begin to see inside Melville’s eco-values to the impact of a heroic animal agency as Moby-Dick follows his values—while our conscience hangs in crooked corridors. In Butcher’s Crossing and representations of buffalo slaughter, correlative human-animal experiences of thirst, ferality, and slaughter are contrasted with western bison hunters on the plains and aliens in such a way that the alien is between humanity and itself. In oiko-logic, literature and ecology share a sympathetic practice similar to the Native American sensibility of Mitakuye Oyasin: “all my relations.”

This study examines a small body of 19th-century American literature about the Antarctic: Adam Seaborn's (pseud.) Symzonia (1820), Edgar Allan Poe's "MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833) and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Peter Prospero's (pseud.) "The Atlantis" (1838-39), and James Fenimore Cooper's The Monikins (1835) and The Sea Lions (1849). These were written in a transitional phase in the history of the Antarctic. At the start of the period, the region was almost completely unknown. Towards the end of the period, however, the region had been mapped in its essence, and the existence of an Antarctic continent had been verified. For complex reasons, the region came into cultural focus in the U.S. during the 1820s to 40s, culminating in the first major American scientific expedition in 1838-42 to explore the South Seas and the Antarctic. The study is primarily historical, tracing ideas to their historical contexts in order to determine what these authors used the unknown space of the Antarctic for. These texts were written in imaginative response to contemporary notions of the Antarctic, which is reflected in the mode of representation. The literature is in the mode of speculative fiction-most of texts imagining a tropical, inhabited Antarctic-up until the region is explored, at which point it turns to realism. The texts fall into three categories: the utopian, liminal, and realistic. The utopian texts-Symzonia, The Monikins, and "The Atlantis"-are works of social criticism, using the blank space of the Antarctic to treat a diverse range of issues, including politics, evolutionary theories, race, and gender. Poe's "MS" and Pym represent the liminal category; they dramatize the anticipation of an imminent Antarctic discovery, narrating up to a point of revelation, only to stop short. The Sea Lions is the only realistic text, coming after the Antarctic is explored. Here the knowledge of the Antarctic has solidified into the environment we know today, but with religiously symbolical overtones.

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