No description available.

No description available.

"Dark Nature" examines literary representations of fears of nature in American literature, from the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century. Critiquing some dominant trends in ecocriticism, this project fills a gap in the field by studying texts that represent nature as a threatening force. By calling attention to such representations, I identify many of the cultural sources of those anxieties about nature at different historical moments. In the process, this project reveals that there has always been a Gothic subtext in the long history of literature about nature in the United States. "Dark Nature" begins by examining representations of Puritan fears of nature in New England, looking at authors such as William Bradford, John Winthrop, and Mary Rowlandson to show how the Puritan worldview established a "pre-Gothic" way of envisioning nature. It then moves to the post-Revolutionary era, using Charles Brockden Brown's "Edgar Huntly" to describe national anxieties about American wilderness and the ways those anxieties undermined contemporary Enlightenment ideals. The third chapter looks at the "darkness" within the work of that most canonical of nature writers, Henry David Thoreau. Despite the optimism of his Transcendental view of nature, I reveal that Thoreau's writing is often pervaded by moments of anxiety and even fear of the natural world. A further chapter about slave narratives shows how Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs present nature as darker than anything their romantic contemporaries produced, often consciously employing Gothic nature imagery as a rhetorical tool of resistance against their white oppressors. Finally, this study concludes with by exploring how some of Herman Melville's writing exemplifies a changing worldview in light of Charles Darwin's theories about natural selection and survival of the fittest. After the mid-nineteenth century, Gothic representations of nature tend to signal different types of fears based no longer on Puritan conceptions of nature, but rather on a post-Darwinian view. In calling attention to this overlooked lineage of writing, "Dark Nature" helps widen the discourse of ecocritical studies, arguing that there is much to be learned from studying representations of nature that are not only un-Romantic, but outright dangerous, violent, and terrifying.

Numerous scholars have observed that Don McKay’s poetry is profoundly musical and particularly attentive to the sounds of birds. However, it has not been examined how musicology can illuminate McKay’s use of birdsong. This thesis addresses McKay’s representation of birdsong by drawing upon musicology, acoustic ecology and ecocriticism. The first chapter examines McKay’s metaphoric and mimetic representations of birdsong. The second chapter explores how McKay uses birdsong to create acoustic spaces within the text. The third chapter probes McKay’s treatment of the physiological processes behind human and avian vocalizations. By defamiliarizing and pushing the boundaries of our language, McKay exposes the epistemological limitations of human language and challenges the species boundary. My hope is that extended attention to the musicality of McKay’s poetry will allow for a fuller appreciation of his treatment of bird vocalizations as songs that extend human language and explore what it means to be human.

This thesis identifies the role of nature within Palaiologan entertainment literature. The texts on which this thesis focuses include a selection of the Palaiologan novels, namely the Achilleid, Velthandros and Chrysandza, Kallimachos and Chrysorroi and Livistros and Rodamni, as well as two other, more satirical works, The Synaxarion of the Honourable Donkey, and An Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds. These texts seem to be different from earlier works in which nature is prominent, utilising such material in an innovative way. The study of these texts provides us with information both on the Byzantine view of the natural world and on the use of literature during a particularly troubled period of Byzantine history. My main questions therefore are how nature is portrayed in these texts and what can this tell us about the society that produced them. The study of these vernacular texts indicates that the natural world is given a prominent place in the literature of the period, using landscapes, plants and animals in diverse ways to express assorted ideas, or to stress particular aspects of the stories. The animals and landscapes provide hints of the plot to the audience, which the authors sometimes then subvert. The authors draw on earlier Greek material, but parallels with literature from other cultures show similarities which imply a shared medieval perspective on nature with local differences.

Monoculture represents a hindrance to literary ecocriticism. While the ecocritical project aims to think globally, doing so within the linguistic confines of a single language restricts access to very helpful (but non-Anglo) textual material. I argue that of this material, Gabriel García Márquez’s novels are particularly useful because of his unique execution of magical realism towards environmental ends. This project uses ecocritical scholarship to revisit Márquez’s works and to examine the ways in which his deployments of environmental magical realism synthesize and build upon ecocritical elements from earlier trends in Latin American literature while suggesting new venues of evolution for the hermeneutics of ecocritical trends. Through a close theoretical reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and the Autumn of the Patriarch, novels which represent useful case studies for his polemical use of magical realism, I conclude that Márquez explores and suggests ways the field of ecocriticism can parse representations of an adversarial relationship between humans and nature.

No description available.

The purpose of this essay is to examine descriptions of nature, both in terms of physical setting and as an abstract entity, and their relation to the concepts of place and regional identity in Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone (2006) and The Outlaw Album (2011). The main thesis is that when it comes to the characters’ relation to nature there is acceptance instead of resistance, and unification instead of separation. The essay also puts forth the argument that acceptance of nature can be seen as one of the key elements in both Winter’s Bone and The Outlaw Album. Moreover, the essay contains the idea that nature is a crucial part of the characters’ sense of regional identity in Winter’s Bone and The Outlaw Album. The theoretical background consists of ecocriticism along with theorizations of regional identity. When it comes to ecocriticism, a wide and multilayered theoretical field, the essay focuses on the works of three different scholars who all address the relationship between man, nature and place, namely Lawrence Buell, Fred Waage and Leonard Lutwack. The analysis consists of two parts. The first part addresses Winter’s Bone and mainly deals with the concept of family, the aspect of rurality and unification with nature within the novel. The second part looks at similar aspects in The Outlaw Album, but here, the emphasis is rather on the concept of outsider–insider, i.e. the difference between native Ozarkers and people who originate from outside the region.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 254-269).

This thesis represents live and on-going research into the recent literary movement that has been termed ‘the new nature writing’. A focus within this movement has arisen which employs particular alertness to aural soundscapes in wild nature. This focus, which for the purposes of the thesis I am limiting to the British Isles, appears to be an increasing attempt to harness the human ear and employ it as a tool for ‘seismic’ effect. The method used, which I have termed ecoseismology, works at the intersection of the sensory and the literary; by using deep listening to external soundscapes it aims to achieve an integrative, internal effect through rendering of experience. Ecoseismology is a response to an intense period of ecological and environmental uncertainty. It is guided by immersive observation, often forensic in its closely-heard detail, where ecological particularities and sonorous dimensions of the natural world are sensed and rendered. Ecoseismology sensitises the listener and the reader in order to achieve shifts in scale where awareness moves from the particular, close-up, ‘heard’ and ‘felt’ experience towards thinking about more ecosensitive ways of living on the planet. To locate the spectrum of experience and output encompassed by ecoseismology the thesis exposes its three stages. By applying these stages to nature writings of the last ten years, texts that use or fit the ecoseismic method are identified. At the heart of these stages is the ecoseismic moment: a re-imagining of crisis provoking thought about the wider ecosystem which is intended to be a catalyst for change. The two ‘classic’ otter books which inspired the creative part of the submission, Otter Country, In Search of the Wild Otter, (shortened to Otter Country from here), are measured against ecoseismology. Then Otter Country’s own ecoseismic structure, which entails a quest for increased understanding of an elusive wild mammal, is measured. Alongside the sensory aspects of close encounter in this new otter narrative, issues of wider ecology are triggered, but didactic solutions are not directly sought. Thoughts provoked by this last aspect of Otter Country provide directions for further research: is it more effective to make readers feel, or to urge them to act? How is this movement within the new nature writing spreading to other genres and media, and what forms will it take, what effects will it have?