Despite watershed damage, pollution and the construction of various kinds of barrier, rivers continue to carry figurative freight in the late twentieth century. This dissertation reads a number of contemporary texts (personal essays, fiction and poetry) that focus on rivers and insist upon contextual, literary and ethical processes of river reflection. The Introduction sites such writing in cycles of recirculation involving author, watershed and community. Chapter One takes up these issues, looking at essays by Lance Kinseth, Scott Russell Sanders, Joan Didion, Edward Abbey (Down The River, 1982) and Kathleen Dean Moore (Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water, 1995), examining questions of memory, ecological change and the limits of language and observation, in order to demonstrate some links between subject and meandering form. Chapter Two records how, by troping the river as a site of revision and healing, Barry Lopez, David James Duncan and Richard Flanagan localise versions of philosopher Hans Jonas's "imperative of responsibility." In part, Duncan's The River Why (1982) and Flanagan's Death of a River Guide (1993) braid personal or regional neo-colonial memory to call Lopez's River Notes (1979) to account. Chapters Three and Four then read the psychic, political and ecological reach of the 'fallen river' through Ivan Illich's commentary on water. Analysis of further fiction by Duncan and Flanagan provides a context for a consideration of Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water (1993) and a discussion of literary representations of the effect of large dams on indigenous communities and the natural environment. By extension, Cormac McCarthy's Suttree (1979) and London psychogeographer Iain Sinclair's Downriver (1991) track two distinct urban riverscapes (by the Tennessee and Thames), figuring them, in Sinclair's words, as "ribbons of memory" in an age of amnesiac capital accumulation. Chapter Five marks ways in which globalisation, loss, memory, form and line transpire through poetry by Tim Bowling and Daphne Marlatt (Steveston, 1974/1984) at the Fraser River; it then re-reads Richard Hugo as a riverscape poet. Finally, a discussion of long poems by Jim Harrison, Don McKay, Gary Snyder and Liz Zetlin leads to a conclusion that emphasises exchange and possibility. The practice of reading written texts inherently invokes a challenge to 'read a river' more attentively. At the cultural (and thus ecological) watershed, memory constitutes a process of contemporary river reflection, which is distinguished by its sense of provisionality, loss and fragile continuity.

Despite watershed damage, pollution and the construction of various kinds of barrier, rivers continue to carry figurative freight in the late twentieth century. This dissertation reads a number of contemporary texts (personal essays, fiction and poetry) that focus on rivers and insist upon contextual, literary and ethical processes of river reflection. The Introduction sites such writing in cycles of recirculation involving author, watershed and community. Chapter One takes up these issues, looking at essays by Lance Kinseth, Scott Russell Sanders, Joan Didion, Edward Abbey (Down The River, 1982) and Kathleen Dean Moore (Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water, 1995), examining questions of memory, ecological change and the limits of language and observation, in order to demonstrate some links between subject and meandering form. Chapter Two records how, by troping the river as a site of revision and healing, Barry Lopez, David James Duncan and Richard Flanagan localise versions of philosopher Hans Jonas's "imperative of responsibility." In part, Duncan's The River Why (1982) and Flanagan's Death of a River Guide (1993) braid personal or regional neo-colonial memory to call Lopez's River Notes (1979) to account. Chapters Three and Four then read the psychic, political and ecological reach of the 'fallen river' through Ivan Illich's commentary on water. Analysis of further fiction by Duncan and Flanagan provides a context for a consideration of Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water (1993) and a discussion of literary representations of the effect of large dams on indigenous communities and the natural environment. By extension, Cormac McCarthy's Suttree (1979) and London psychogeographer Iain Sinclair's Downriver (1991) track two distinct urban riverscapes (by the Tennessee and Thames), figuring them, in Sinclair's words, as "ribbons of memory" in an age of amnesiac capital accumulation. Chapter Five marks ways in which globalisation, loss, memory, form and line transpire through poetry by Tim Bowling and Daphne Marlatt (Steveston, 1974/1984) at the Fraser River; it then re-reads Richard Hugo as a riverscape poet. Finally, a discussion of long poems by Jim Harrison, Don McKay, Gary Snyder and Liz Zetlin leads to a conclusion that emphasises exchange and possibility. The practice of reading written texts inherently invokes a challenge to 'read a river' more attentively. At the cultural (and thus ecological) watershed, memory constitutes a process of contemporary river reflection, which is distinguished by its sense of provisionality, loss and fragile continuity. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This study first briefly discusses the Rivers of America series as a whole, with regard to its origin, its plan, and its public acceptance. Next there is a discussion of the volumes about Southern rivers, including an analysis of the authors' qualifications, organization, scope, treatment, reviewer's opinions, and recommendations by library book selection aids of each volume. Incidental treatment is given to the illustrator's qualifications and the general use of art work in the volumes. The summation attempts to show the success or failure of these volumes about Southern rivers to meet the criteria outlined for the series in the prospectus and to indicate some basic changes in the contents, the variety of reviewers' attitudes through the years, and the importance of these books as Southern regional writing. / Typescript. / "August, 1959." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Louise Galloway, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-59).

Thesis--Bonn. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 273-282).

Thesis--Bonn. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 273-282).

This thesis considers a selection of modern landscape poetry from an ecocritical perspective, arguing that this poetry demonstrates how the term landscape might be re-imagined in relation to contemporary environmental concerns. Each chapter discusses poetic responses to a different kind of landscape: gardens, forests, rivers and islands. Chapter One explores how, in the poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Douglas Dunn, Louise Glück and David Harsent, gardens are culturally constructed landscapes in which ideas of self, society and environment are contemplated; I ask whether gardening provides a positive example of how people might interact with the natural world. My second chapter demonstrates that for Sorley MacLean, W.S. Merwin, Susan Stewart and Kathleen Jamie, forests are sites of memory and sustainable ‘dwelling', but that deforestation threatens both the ecology and the culture of these landscapes. Chapter Three compares river poems by Ted Hughes and Alice Oswald, considering their differing approaches to river sources, mystical immersion in nature, water pollution and poetic experimentation; I discuss how in W.S. Graham's poetry the sea provides a complex image of the phenomenal world similar to Oswald's river. The final chapter examines the extent to which islands in poetry are pastoral landscapes and environmental utopias, looking in particular at poems by Dunn, Robin Robertson, Iain Crichton Smith and Jen Hadfield. I reflect upon the potential for island poetry to embrace narratives of globalisation as well as localism, and situate the work of George Mackay Brown and Robert Alan Jamieson within this context. I engage with a range of ecocritical positions in my readings of these poets and argue that the linguistic creativity, formal inventiveness and self-reflexivity of poetry constitute a distinctive contribution to contemporary understandings of landscape and the environment.