Explorations in place attachment

Abstract

publicity) and facing a silent archive, Navakas foregrounds selected “imaginative reflections.” This chapter illustrates how a more comprehensive literature review would have served Navakas well, particularly when drawing from a fascinating and obscure set of sources (e.g. Joshua Reed Giddings and the children’s novelist Francis Robert Goulding). The fifth chapter, finally, closes with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s late writings from the St. Johns River. With an elegant circularity, Navakas comes back to the earlier theme of roots, through the saw palmetto. The ground-hugging Serenoa repens, Navakas reminds us, served as Stowe’s metaphor for living in the state, a foundational model that was “adapted to local material realities” and that offered an “alternative form of growth” (133). In contrast to her popular writings about housekeeping, interestingly, Stowe’s house in Mandarin possessed an unruly relationship with nature, leading Navakas to draw out a post-Civil War parable: that “incorporation must take a variety of forms” (153). A short Coda, finally, nudges the argument into the past century, using Zora Neale Hurston to connect the book’s central themes to our own time. Navakas’s archival project, framed against early America as both setting and historiography, is to desettle, to challenge our “concepts of land, boundaries and foundations” (156). In Florida the lines between land and water are in constant flux. A nod to global climate change and rising sea levels emphasizes the continued relevance of a state whose literary history offers a “vibrant language through which to imagine our relation to others and the natural world” (157). The book thus closes on an ethos, underscoring how the best literary landscapes can also serve as commentary and critique.