No description available.

This study seeks to demonstrate that nature provided Frost an objective background against which he could measure the validity of human experience and gain a fuller understanding of it. The experiences examined with reference to the poetry include loneliness, anxiety, sorrow, and hope. Attention is given to the influence of Frost's philosophical skepticism upon his poetry. The study reveals that Frost discovered correspondences between nature and human experience which clarified his perspective of existence. The experiences of loneliness, anxiety, and sorrow were found to relate to Frost's feeling of separation from nature and from the source of existence. The experience of hope was found to relate to Frost's vision of the wholeness and unity of life, a vision which derives from humanity's common source with nature.

Proefschrift--Amsterdam. / Published also without thesis note. "Stellingen": 2 leaves laid in. "List of books consulted": p. [194]-202.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1955 L69 / Master of Science

This dissertation explores how the descriptive backgrounds of the Victorian novel helped to shape the emerging concept of environment in the nineteenth century. Thomas Carlyle introduced “environment” into English in 1827, spurring writers, scientists, and social thinkers to forge a diverse conceptual lexicon for describing the relationship between organisms and their material surroundings. Comte developed the idea of a singular organic “medium” that supports and nourishes all living beings, while Darwin imagined the plural “conditions of existence” as a chaotic field of competitive struggle. Whereas Zola’s “milieu” exerted destructive pressure on the individual, Spencer claimed that “environment” was in fact constitutive of life itself. This project argues that novelists turned to vivid description as a means of materializing these competing environmental discourses, and exploring their social and affective implications. From the noxious fogs of Bleak House, to Mary Mitford’s concern for the sufferings of uprooted vegetables, novelists gave detailed attention to the exchanges between individual bodies and the physical world. Each of my four chapters examines how a Victorian writer used a distinct type of description to explore an environmental concept: Mitford’s botanical detail and natural theology’s idea of correspondence between body and world; Eliot’s weather and Comte’s organic medium; Hardy’s architecture and Spencer’s theory of environment; and Stevenson’s islands and the discourse of circumstance. Whereas recent critical re-evaluations of description often prize its detachability from narrative, this dissertation thus argues that description was central to the Victorian novel’s ability to represent interactions between individuals and their surroundings. Through close analysis of the descriptive surrounds of nineteenth-century realist fiction (weather, atmosphere, landscape, architecture), this project shows how the novel’s described backgrounds shape and participate in plot in surprising ways, functioning not merely as static pictorial backgrounds to narrative, but rather as dynamic participants in it. The Victorian novel, this dissertation ultimately shows, places interactions between characters and their environments at the center, rather than the periphery, of its drama.

This dissertation argues that the journeys of naturalists, explorers, intellectuals, and engineers through the Amazon in the second half of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth century gave rise to perspectives that challenge foundational assumptions about technology in modern metropolitan centers. Chief among these assumptions are the ideas that technology contributes to specialization, the disenchantment of reality, the entrapment of the subject in the logistics of urban labor, and the removal of natural obstacles. The examination of the roles of nature and technology in texts and images of the period shows that travel and exploration were represented as experiences of enchantment and encounters with impassable terrains. The dissertation focuses on three interconnected cases to support its thesis: Euclides da Cunha’s reading of the naturalists in his essays on the Amazon; experiences and practices of exploration on the Madeira and Mamoré Rivers; and the construction of a railroad along these rivers to render the hauling of vessels over land and long voyages unnecessary. Developing a cultural-historical framework that counters narratives of technological domination and failure, the dissertation concludes that the tensions between exploration and engineering in these cases reveal the eschatological facets of the history of technology. The eschatological facets show both how technologies contribute to the construction of the farthest frontiers and how technologies themselves arrive at their final stages.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Divinity School, August 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2005. / "May, 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-113). Online version available on the World Wide Web. Library also has microfilm. Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [2005]. 1 microfilm reel ; 35 mm.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2009 Jun 15