"Nothing typifies the American sense of identity more," Mark Seltzer writes at the beginning of his 1992 book Bodies and Machines , "than the love of nature (nature's nation) except perhaps the love of technology (made in America)." The term "nature," along with a few others--"culture," "technology," "nation"--has been of central importance in American literary and cultural studies throughout the past century. The essays in his special issue of American...