Sentimental Eco-Memoir: Refuge, Hole in the Sky, and the Necessary Reader

In the recent issue of Western American Literature devoted to the subject of "Western Autobiography and Memoir", a recurring theme asserts itself: according to the issue editors as well as several contributing essayists and reviewers, "the project of identity is relational," as demonstrated even in the autobiography of a Victorian cowboy. ¹ In making this claim, editors Kathleen Boardman and Gioia Woods join recent autobiographical critics in defining the genre's subject as "encumbered," not solitary or autonomous. ² In this regard, theorists of autobiography echo literary historians who are recovering a nineteenth-century sentimental tradition. The sentimental subject, according to critic Joanne Dobson, responds to "the tragedy of separation, of severed human ties" by envisioning the "self-in-relation." ³ Such a self, as Mary Louise Kete elaborates, "exists only by and through others." ⁴ While autobiographical theorists have begun to recognize a number of "relations" that define the textual "self", sentimental literary historians have best theorized the relation most significant for two prominent western memoirs in which the presentations of a "self" serves an eco-political agenda.