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| Lawrence Buell | |
|---|---|
| Name | Lawrence Buell |
| Birth date | 1939 |
| Birth place | Wheaton, Illinois |
| Nationality | United States |
| Occupation | Literary critic; Scholar; Professor |
| Education | Harvard University (A.B.), Yale University (Ph.D.) |
| Notable works | The Environmental Imagination; The Dream of the Great American Novel |
| Awards | Bollingen Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship |
Lawrence Buell is an American literary critic and scholar known for shaping contemporary approaches to American literature and environmental humanities. He served as a prominent professor at Harvard University and produced influential books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction as well as foundational texts in ecocriticism. His interdisciplinary work intersects with figures and institutions across literary studies, environmental studies, and cultural history.
Buell was born in Wheaton, Illinois and raised amid mid-twentieth-century American cultural contexts linked to Postwar United States developments and Cold War intellectual currents. He completed an A.B. at Harvard College before pursuing graduate study at Yale University, where he earned a Ph.D. under advisors active in scholarship related to American Renaissance, Henry James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. His formative training engaged scholars and departments associated with New Criticism, the rise of American Studies, and archival resources at institutions like the Guggenheim Fellowship-supporting foundations.
Buell joined the faculty of Harvard University in the Department of English language and Comparative Literature (note: department names as institutional proper nouns) and became a central figure in Harvard's programming connected to the Radcliffe Institute and the multidisciplinary conversations involving the American Studies Association and the Modern Language Association. He taught courses that integrated primary texts by Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Toni Morrison with theoretical work from scholars linked to New Historicism, Deconstruction-inflected criticism, and Reader-response criticism. Buell held visiting or fellowship appointments at centers such as the Institute for Advanced Study, the Smithsonian Institution, and research libraries including the Houghton Library and the Library of Congress.
Buell's critical oeuvre includes monographs, edited collections, and essays that engage the long nineteenth-century and the American novel. His early major study, The Dream of the Great American Novel, situates novels by Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville-contemporaries within debates involving the American Renaissance and historiographical projects around national identity. Subsequent works examine realism and narrative strategies alongside criticism of authors such as Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, and Sarah Orne Jewett. Buell edited and contributed to volumes that brought attention to archival recovery projects tied to figures like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and revisionist readings of Antebellum and Reconstruction literature. His essays have appeared in journals and collections alongside contributions from critics associated with Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, Geoffrey Hartman, and Sandra M. Gilbert.
Buell is widely credited with articulating the theoretical scaffolding of contemporary ecocriticism through works such as The Environmental Imagination, which dialogues with literary representations by Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, John Muir, and Rachel Carson. He defines criteria for environmental texts and explores intersections with movements and institutions including the Sierra Club, the Environmental Protection Agency, and policy conversations sparked by the National Environmental Policy Act. Buell's ecocritical method draws on intellectual histories involving Transcendentalism, the conservation debates of Gifford Pinchot and Aldo Leopold, and later environmental literature from writers like Edward Abbey and Annie Dillard. His work has shaped curricula in programs at universities such as Yale University, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Oxford and influenced interdisciplinary centers including the Rachel Carson Center and the Center for Environmental Humanities.
Buell's scholarship has been recognized with major fellowships and prizes from institutions and awarding bodies such as the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry-adjacent honors (note: awarded for related humanities distinction), and honors from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received grants from agencies including the National Endowment for the Humanities and been elected to learned societies like the Modern Language Association committees and boards tied to the American Philosophical Society. His books have won citation and book awards administered through organizations including the Association of American Publishers and the American Studies Association.
Buell's personal affiliations have included mentorship of scholars who now hold posts at institutions such as Harvard University, Princeton University, Columbia University, University of Chicago, and Brown University. His legacy is evident in the proliferation of ecocritical conferences sponsored by the Modern Language Association, panels at the American Comparative Literature Association, and graduate programs in environmental humanities at universities including Dartmouth College and University of Michigan. He has participated in public-facing lectures hosted by cultural institutions like the New York Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution, ensuring ongoing dialogues between literary scholarship and public policy debates exemplified by forums connected to the United Nations Environment Programme and national conservation initiatives.
Category:American literary critics Category:Harvard University faculty Category:Yale University alumni Category:1939 births