This project seeks to give Stephen King and Pet Sematary full consideration through applying a multi-faceted ecocritical approach to a novel so clearly founded on the relationship between the land and its inhabitants. Through my analysis of the environment’s role in Pet Sematary, I will engage with important questions asked by both Historical and New Materialists in order to examine as completely as possible the relationship between Indigenous peoples and colonist conceptions of property, land use, and nonhuman agency present in the pages. Study of this sort engages in a critique of settler colonial ideals through a thorough examination of one of popular culture’s most successful and apparently errant offenders of intentional appropriation of Indigenous belief. Ultimately, this project seeks to reclaim not only Pet Sematary or King’s oeuvre, but the horror genre more broadly. Given the genre’s affordances for critiquing material histories, this project asserts horror’s utility for the development of new understandings of old fears and particularly as a means of asserting nonhuman agency. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

In Mean Spirit, Solar Storms, and Power, Linda Hogan uses the devices of silence, absence, and mystery to articulate the oppression and marginalization of Native Americans. Specifically, because of the environmental crises that produce conflict in each novel, the project benefits from ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and ecopsychology. Also, because of various interpretations that open up when silence is examined, theories of deconstruction strengthen the thesis. Ultimately, Hogan's characters move from silence as a form of tyranny to silence as a form of reconnection with tribal ways. As the characters discover pathways to native traditions, they also discover spiritual connections with the biosphere. The movement from silence as a form of tyranny to silence as healing to silence as a means of reconnection with tribal traditions and kinship with the environment ensures the natives' healing and survival. The Introduction discusses the overview of the project, illustrates my thesis regarding Hogan's use of silence, absence, and mystery, and outlines my critical methodology. In the methodology chapter, I detail specific references to ecocritical, ecofeminist, ecopsychological, and deconstructive texts that I use to analyze Hogan's novels. Beginning with Chapter Two, I discuss Mean Spirit, which is based on a true story involving the murders of Osage people during the 1920s in Oklahoma. In Chapter Three, I examine Solar Storms and track Hogan's use of silence, absence, and mystery in the story of a teenage girl who returns to her birthplace and reconnects with her tribe and the wild lands surrounding her home. Chapter Four features my close reading of Power, a coming-of-age story blended with eocological and ethical conflicts taking place in rural Florida. Finally, Chapter Five concludes the thesis and reasserts my argument that Hogan's use of silence, absence, and mystery illuminates the conflicts in her characters' lives and ultimately serves to clear a space for healing and survival.

Den västtyske författaren Alfred Andersch (1914–1980) var mest känd för sina romaner och noveller. Men han gjorde också betydande insatser som litterär reseskildrare. På 1950- och 60-talen åkte han vid flera tillfällen runt i Skandinavien och Arktis. I böckerna Wanderungen im Norden (1962) och Hohe Breitengrade (1969) sammanställde han sina upplevelser i en blandning av resereportage och skönlitteratur. Wanderungen im Norden handlar om olika resor i Sverige och Norge på 1950-talet, framför allt i de svenska skogs- och fjällandskapen. Den moderna turisten som fenomen, skogsindustrins relation till folkhemmet, glesbygden som livsmiljö, jägaren som manligt kodad aktör och naturen som estetisk utmaning är några av de teman som avhandlas. Där finns också inslag av naturskildringar där den gamla dikotomin aktiv människa-passiv natur ifrågasätts och upphävs.  Förhållandet människa-natur och språk-landskap var centrala teman i hela Anderschs författarskap. Uppsatsen visar genom textanalyser och med ett ekokritiskt perspektiv som utgångspunkt, hur personerna i boken projicierar olika föreställningar om naturen på de olika miljöer och landskap de befinner sig i. Den undersöker också med nymaterialismen som teoretisk ansats i vilken grad naturen skildras som en självständig aktör med egna intentioner och vilja bortom människans kontroll.  Analysen visar att Alfred Andersch i Wanderungen im Norden aktivt problematiserar föreställningen om en sträng människa-natur-hierarki. Bokens gestaltningar av relationerna mellan människorna och de omgivande skogs- och fjällandskapen på 1950-talet pekar framåt mot en begynnande miljörörelse och är ett tidigt exempel på en modern, ekokritisk medvetenhet i europeisk litteratur.

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This thesis -- originally entitled “Reckoning the Unnamed Fabric”, both a cultural study of the poetics of ecological consciousness and the ecology of poetic consciousness -- investigates the post-Romantic legacy informing John Burnside’s (b. 1955) poetry from The hoop (1988) to The Light Trap (2002) as a case study. The thesis argues that a developing aesthetic form and movement in subject derive from Burnside’s increasing involvement with ecological thought and practice. This move to the poetry of the oikos begins with an investigation of the self through the reconciliation of subject with object (or human with nature), and latterly has moved into a sustained reflection upon the idea of dwelling. This thesis relates the chronological development across Burnside’s nature poetry to an aesthetic infused with religious iconography and language, which via an evolving motif-poem of ‘world-soul’ or ‘communal fabric’ increases in its secular and empirical inflection. I read Burnside’s elevation of historical materialism s a progression in Wordsworthian craft and as a result of the poet’s pragmatic reflection on dwelling; I argue that the poetic consolidation of the intrinsic value of nature as an active and guiding spirit promotes nature less as a place for inhabitants than as the site and point of relation. The argument responds to Burnside’s transatlantic perspective from which he questions what it means to live as a spirit, and what a poetics of ecology can achieve in respect to the human subjective lyric and the need to transcend the human into the collective. To address these questions, which are implicit in Burnside's oeuvre, I draw upon Heideggerian poetics and American post-Transcendentalist Romanticism. I locate Burnside’s poetics within philosophical, aesthetic, and ecological frameworks. First, Burnside’s poetry is primarily a poetics of ontology that understands the ‘I’ within the midst of things yet underpinned by epistemology/hermeneutics; second, Burnside exhibits neo-Romantic poetry that has engaged with Modern American poetry -- it is this fusion that I call post-Romantic; third, the ecological constitutes both Burnside’s political stance and his aesthetic-poetic stance. I read the latter as a reflection of Jonathan Bate’s notion of the ecopoem as the “post-phenomenological inflection of high Romantic poetics”, an idea which is most apposite when read in relationship with Burnside’s path towards the metaphysical inscribed in the historical.

ABSTRACT This thesis deals with the theme of the environmental worth and the contemporary developmental relevance of traditional oral poetry. The specific subject matter is the worth of the traditional oral poetry of Asante/Ashanti (one of the groups of the Akan cultural group in Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Togo in West Africa) and its relevance as a source of inspiration for the raising of environmental consciousness. The premise of the thesis is that there existed within traditional oral literature some environmental knowledge which responded to the needs of traditional society. The knowledge in this literature can be revamped and harnessed to help direct the environmental aspect of current developmental approaches. For that reason, the thesis takes as its point of departure and primary data some traditional Asante proverb-poems. These proverbpoems had the status and role of myths engendered by society to fashion and guide humans’ interaction with Nature. This assimilation between proverb-poem and society’s environmental precepts implied that society had (consciously or unconsciously) cast the proverb-poem in the role of an environmental preceptor to guide society. Beliefs about Nature and the practices thereof which are enshrined in these proverbpoems, therefore, contained the knowledge which guided the use of natural resources and hence the direction of development and sustainability in traditional Asante society. Invariably, the environmental outlook of society, its values and interests, its projections and directions, and its development, all came to be informed by the knowledge contained in this myth/proverb-poem. It is pertinent to note that the type of environmental demands required by contemporary Asante is reminiscent of the sustainability which oral literature helped traditional Asante to attain. This comparison is validated for two main reasons. The first is the fact that today development in perceived as a shift from the prioritization of the military security of states and regimes to an emphasis on seven cardinal areas which complement state and regime security. These are - Economic security, Food security, Health security, Environmental security, Personal security, Community security, and Political security. This thesis focuses on the environmental aspect. Second, development focuses on exploring local alternative approaches to the problem of environmental degradation. In this regard, the thesis argues that aspects of the manner in which cultural communities express their relationship with Nature is recoverable through a literary study of the images and belief system found in their rendition of Nature. These images, their perceptions, and the attitude they express toward Nature, offer a framework within which to evaluate possible culture-specific solutions to contemporary environmental problem. It is for the above reason that this work evaluates a selection of traditional Asante proverb-poems to find out the extent to which they served to mediate environmental consciousness and Nature conservation in traditional Asante. In order to arrive at a more reliable conclusion, this investigation first evaluates the ways in which institutions and practices such as Asante political system, the nature of their myths and taboos, their impact on their environment, their relation with colonial environmentalism, the nature and the archival function of their poetry and their entire cosmovision can be said to resemble or reflect the manner in which the Asante formulated the relationship between humans on one hand and flora, fauna, and landscape on the other. It is revealed that their predilection for co-existence with nature advocated in these literary texts largely resembled the normative values and institutional structures of traditional Asante community. Using Structuralism and Ecocriticism the work presents each persona of the various proverb-poems as opposing some prevailing attitudes to nature by critiquing, teaching, encouraging, condemning, exalting the audience to perceive nature as kin, nature as a beneficent agent to appreciate, nature as a danger to avoid, and nature as a domain to which humans are accountable. The thesis also advances the opinion that those attitudes which sustained environmental viability could be reworked and adapted to feed into the creation of a mind-sets which can enhance human perceptions about Nature today and contribute to the search for solutions to environmental degradation. In addition to the above anthropo-developmental dimension, the analysis reveals some specificities of the literary analysis of oral environmental texts of traditional societies. It equally shows the nature of the peculiar challenges faced in the environmental arena by developmental objectives. The work is, therefore, inspired by the need to contribute ideas and perceptions that can eventually feed into the debates around solutions toward the solving of environmental problems. Thus, the work seeks to do this by using literary approaches to highlight and draw on traditional knowledge to enrich the present search for indigenous ways of conceptualizing human-Nature relations and of solving current environmental problems.

This thesis analyzes the relationship between German fairy tales and Ecocriticism by examining the similarities and differences in depictions of nature in the tales published by the Brothers Grimm in 1857 and tales written by political activists during Germany's Weimar Republic. "Frau Holle" and "Die drei Schlangenblätter" by the Brothers Grimm present nature as a means to support their bourgeois utopian ideals. On the other hand, the Weimar writers Carl Ewald and Edwin Hörnle's tales "Ein Märchen von Gott und den Königen" and "Der kleine König und die Sonne" (respectively) employ the traditional form of the fairy tale to espouse free-thinking and criticize the weaknesses of the Grimms' utopian ideal. My ecocritical analysis is based on a synthesis of environmental sciences and sociocultural influences.

The topic of this doctoral thesis is the nature essay: a literary form that became widely used in European literature around 1800 and continues to flourish in times of ecological crisis. Blending natural history discourse, essayistic thought patterns, personal anecdotes, and lyrical descriptions, nature essays are hybrid literary texts. Their authors have often been writers with a background in science. As interdis-cursive agents they move swiftly between different knowledge formations. This equips them with a unique potential in the context of ecology. Essayistic narrators can grasp the interdisciplinary character of environmental issues because they have the ability to combine different types of knowledge. They can be encyclopae¬dic fact mongers, metaphysical ramblers and ethical counsellors. More often than not they are all in one person. Where nature essays were taken into consideration so far they were mostly discussed together with other nature-oriented nonfiction forms under the label ‘nature writing’. This study proposes a different approach in that it insists that the nature essay has to be understood as a literary form in its own right. It explores canonical works of nature writing, such as Thoreau’s Walden, often for the first time as nature essays by discussing them alongside other typical examples of this genre tradition. In order to better understand the discursive impact of this form, I frame my discussion in the context of ecocritical theory. This means that I analyse my corpus of texts with regard to the ways in which writers depict the relationships between human and nonhuman spheres. Putting a particular focus on Germanic and An-glophone literature, the present thesis investigates central paradigms in the evolu-tion of nature essay writing. It covers a time period that stretches from its roots in late eighteenth-century natural history discourse to the present, identifying key epistemological, formal, and thematic patterns of this literary form the importance of which so far has been rather neglected by literary criticism.

This thesis demonstrates how animals and humans are interconnected in Old Norse literature. The two categories are both constructed and challenged in a variety of ways, depending on the textual genre and animal species. It thus reveals medieval Norse-Icelandic ideas, values, and beliefs about animals. The thesis is theoretical, comparative, and interdisciplinary, yet firmly rooted in a close reading of the sagas and analysis of their cultural-historical context. The first chapter explores relationships between people and domestic animals, namely horses and dogs, and to a lesser extent, cats and livestock. The second chapter evaluates the limitations to the human-animal relationship: prohibitions against bestiality and the consumption of certain animals as meat. The third chapter studies animals in dreams, which reflect human characters and share their fate and defining characteristics. The fourth chapter investigates human-animal transformations, whether physical, psychological, or both. The fifth chapter analyses human-animal communication, with a particular focus on human comprehension of the language of birds. The sixth chapter considers relations between animals and gods in Norse mythology; these parallel the connections between humans and animals in the sagas. The thesis determines how the human/animal dichotomy might have been thought about differently before and after the conversion to Christianity, with boundaries between animal and human becoming more clearly delineated; it examines how medieval Icelandic authors wrote about animals in experiential terms, but also drew upon conventional symbolism from continental Europe; and it proves how these literary representations of animals reflect an environmental ideology that was actively engaged with the imaginative, the supernatural, and the animal.

This dissertation examines how the non-human (the natural, not the other-worldly) world and its creatures were voiced in several late medieval English texts: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale and Manciple's Tale, and the Towneley Second Shepherds' Play. The dissertation is organized into three chapters which severally allocate voicing the non-human to three different (although conceivably overlapping) modes of representation - acoustic, formal, and performative. Underpinning this project is the objective to place these texts in a historicized ecocritical context. In the first chapter I analyze the figurative (and formative) sounds the natural world "speaks" as it advances a crescendo of insistent clamor in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I argue that this poem exploits the common (and serviceable) conviction of the analogous equivalency of the two categories woman and nature - in order to register the anxieties engendered by the encroachments of women and the natural world in post-plague England. The second chapter addresses how the voices of domestication and its discontents unfold in the use Chaucer makes of the protean genres of fable and exemplum, proverbs, and the deployment of similes in two of his bird tales. I rely on current theorizing of interspecies and intra-species domestication to identify and extract the discontents I have found to be inhering in its processes: savagery/violence, hybridity, uninvited and unintended transformations, and theft. The third chapter considers how human and non-human voices confoundingly yet steadily implicated and entangled in one another - performatively discover homes amid multiple ranges, including silence, volume, laughter, and music. This chapter represents the effort to subtend and complicate existing understandings of this popular late medieval pageant by thinking in terms of ranges, variations, and multivalent characterizations, rather than slots, hierarchies, stabilities, and characters who have become little more than canned effigies. In conclusion, I argue that late medieval poetic texts show a remarkable diversity in the ways and means their authors chose to variously voice the non-human, and that the particular forms this voicing took shaped, even as it was shaped, by the non-human world around them. This diversity and variation enables a more complex understanding of the different avenues and directions this voicing afforded to succeeding generations.