Thesis (Ph.D.)--Auburn University, 2005. / Abstract. Includes bibliographic references (ℓ. 188-206)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1997. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 343-352).

This dissertation reveals a hitherto unrecognized thread of speculative postapocalyptic fantasies underlying nineteenth-century accounts of the American frontier. Many critics have exposed the latent imperialism behind popular myths of primeval wilderness and virgin land; bringing together fictional tales, travel writings, and scientific texts, I show that U.S. authors who enthusiastically celebrated these myths distorted rather than escaped the bounds of history. Their literature results in an uncanny historicism that unsettles narratives of material progress by conflating ancient territorial rupture with a potentially disastrous future. The Illinois prairie of the 1840s thus appeared to Margaret Fuller as a country that has been carefully cultivated by a civilized people, who had been suddenly removed from the earth, with all the works of their hands, and the land given again into nature's keeping. Fuller's notion of hidden destruction behind a vision of natural tranquility was not uncommon. Striving to reconcile their projection of an empty continent with the myriad traces of both Native Americans and prior European settlers, writers such as William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, and Jack London crafted historical narratives that imagined the swift annihilation of entire populations. For them, the blank slate of the American continent was simultaneously a ruined wasteland, and the mythical American Adam was really an American Noah - a patriarch of a new world built on the violent dissolution of the old. U.S. frontier literature between the War of 1812 and the First World War contains postapocalyptic themes like the last man on earth, the lapse into barbarism, and ruin-strewn landscapes. As a key example, I read Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) as a narrative of biological extinction that foreshadows his later national apocalyptic allegory The Crater (1847). Similarly, I contend that the industrial ruins a young Thoreau discovered in the Maine woods spurred him to imagine a suddenly depopulated Massachusetts in his journal. These postapocalyptic fantasies often attempted to deny the ongoing presence and property claims of Native Americans by relegating the original inhabitants of American soil to a separate past, yet they also suggested that the United States itself might be subject to imminent catastrophe.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 330-343). / Microfiche. / ix, 343 leaves, bound 29 cm

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2001. / Director: Elizabeth Ammons. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 234-254). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1997. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 210-222).

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2003. / Thesis research directed by: English Language and Literature. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.

"The purpose of this paper is to present the life and works of Laura Ingalls Wilder with special attention paid to those influences that have given her work an enduring quality and to give a critical evaluation of her work as found in reviews written by experts in the field of children's literature"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "August, 1955." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-57).

The term pioneer simply means one who pushes ahead to remove obstacles and to prepare the way for others who are to follow. Nevertheless, when we speak of the pioneers in American history, we are really speaking of three different types of men who have only a little in common. All pioneers leave behind them settled communities and highly civilized life and push out into an unknown and. unsettled country;y. Also, all pioneers are seekers, but they do not all seek the same things, Some are seeking adventure. These are the explorers, the pioneers seized with the wanderlust, those who move on and on from one place to another, and, if they live long enough, finally come back; to their friends telling wonderful tales of what they have seen and done. The second group includes those who are seeking for gold, some literally and some figuratively. The miners, the trappers, the hunters might all be classed here. The third group includes those who seek an opportunity to build new homes. These are the pioneers whose work is permanent and most worthwhile. In this sense the Puritans and other early settlers were pioneers of the truest type. They were willing to leave home and friends in order to found a new and better home for themselves and their children. The explorer and gold seeker were necessary for the complete settlement of .the United States. but after all, it was the home seeker who finally conquered the forests and the plains. The home-seeker, to be a good pioneer, must have within him. however, the courage and impetuous desire of the explorer to push forward if he is to be successful. He must be willing to endure any number of hardships and even defeat if he is to carry out his purpose. It is this last type of pioneer whom the modern novelist has sought to portray and interpret, and in this discussion only those novels which deal with such pioneers will be discussed.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wyoming, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on June 15, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-62).