In this dissertation, I argue that two dominant perspectives on farming in Canada—the technoscientific capitalist perspective on modern industrial farming and the popular vision of hard-won survival on the family farm—both draw on narrative and aesthetic strategies that have deep roots in distinct, but related variations of the georgic tradition, which arrived in Canada in the eighteenth century and continues to shape literary representations and material practices today. Critics of Canadian literature have tended to subsume the georgic under the category of pastoral, but I argue that the georgic is a separate and more useful category for understanding the complex myths and realities of agricultural production in Canada precisely because it is a literary genre that focuses on the labour of farming and because it constitutes a complex and multi-generic discourse which both promotes and enables critique of dominant agricultural practices. I argue that, despite its sublimation beneath the pastoral, the georgic mode has also been an important cultural nexus in Canadian literature and culture, and that it constitutes a set of conventions that have become so commonplace in writing that deals with agricultural labour and its related issues in Canada that they have come to seem both inevitable and natural within the Canadian cultural tradition, even if they have not been explicitly named as georgic. By analyzing a variety of texts such as Oliver Goldmith’s The Rising Village, Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie, Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh, Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese, Al Purdy’s In Search of Owen Roblin, Robert Kroetsch’s “The Ledger,” Christian Bok’s Xenotext, Rita Wong’s Forage, and Phil Hall’s Amanuensis, I recontextualize Canadian writing that deals with agrarian work within two distinct but related georgic traditions. As Raymond Williams and others have shown, the georgic’s inclusion of both pastoralizing myths and material realities makes it useful for exploring ecological questions. The georgic is often understood in terms of what Karen O’Brien has called the imperial georgic mode, which involves a technocratic, imperialist, capitalist approach to agriculture, and which helped theorize and justify imperial expansion and the technological domination of nature. But as ecocritics like David Fairer, Margaret Ronda, and Kevin Goodman have argued, the georgic’s concern with the contingency and precariousness of human relationships with nonhuman systems also made it a productive site for imagining alternatives to imperial ways of organizing social and ecological relations. Ronda calls this more ecologically-focused and adaptable georgic the disenchanted georgic, but I call it the precarious georgic because of the way it enables engagement with what Anna Tsing calls precarity. Precarity, as Tsing explains, describes life without the promise of mastery or stability, which is a condition that leaves us in a state of being radically dependent on other beings for survival. “The challenge for thinking with precarity,” she writes, “is to understand the ways projects for making scalability have transformed landscape and society, while seeing also where scalability fails—and where nonscalable ecological and economic relations erupt” (42). By tracing the interplay between imperial and precarious georgic modes in Canadian texts that have mistakenly been read as pastoral—from Moodie’s settler georgic to the queer gothic georgic of Ostenso’s Wild Geese to the provisional and object-oriented georgics of Robert Kroetsch and Phil Hall—I argue that the precarious georgic strain has always engaged in this process of thinking with precarity, and that it holds the potential for providing space to re-imagine our ecological relations.

This study examines the modernist fiction by three transnational women writers who turned to the ocean in their writing during the first half of the twentieth century to navigate their divided or hyphenated national identities. The Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), the Finland-Swedish author Hagar Olsson (1893-1978), and the New Zealand short story writer of English descent, Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), use ocean space in their fiction, in the form of both sea imagery and material seascape settings, to unsettle ideologically limiting and culturally anchored categories of identity, gender, class, place and time. The modernist aesthetics and marginal ethics of these white colonial women who existed at a slant to the geographical and cultural center of the British, masculine metropolis pivot on two competing ocean views. First, the sea features in their work as a historically compliant, smooth surface in the service of the establishment, enabling and justifying imperial expansion and colonial settlement, as well as defining and patrolling the uncompromising borders of the land-based modern nation state. Alternately, the ocean comes to disrupt progressive imperial models of history, to inspire fluid and transgressive ideologies, to bear witness to violent histories submerged by official records, and to confound our sense of scale and chronological time through outsized subterranean ecologies that blur the line between land and water, and, as a consequence, throw into question larger fundamental, ontological distinctions, such as that between the ‘human’ and the ‘non-human,’ or ‘more-than-human.’ By bringing postcolonial and ecocritical perspectives to bear on Bowen, Mansfield and Olsson’s literary representations of the ocean, my study contributes to the current expanding reach of modernist studies, ushering into the critical spotlight global regions previously overlooked and misfit writers traditionally dismissed, to locate that which modernity originally defined itself against at the vibrant heart of that construction.

The prairie ecosystem of the American Midwest has long been depicted as a "lost landscape." Two-hundred years of Euro-American settlement has degraded the ecological prairie through systematic removal of native grasses and forbs, replacement with nonnative and invasive plant species, disruption of longstanding disturbance regimes (such as prairie fires), and the fragmentation of ecosystem connectivity. The prairie's depiction in art, literature, history, politics, and our national environmental discourse, collectively referred to in this study as the "cultural prairie," has not fared much better. Beginning in the early nineteenth-century, explorers and soldiers, writers and artists, settlers and promoters perpetuated an image of the "vanishing prairie" in travel narratives prolifically published for consumption by a burgeoning American readership. As the "vanishing prairie" emerged as the accepted image of the prairie, narratives depicting its disappearance from the landscape became self-fulfilling prophecies. Language, and narrative in particular, thus contributed to the degradation of the ecological prairie. Narratives of the "vanishing prairie" are characterized by what Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor terms "absence, nihility, and victimry." One remedy to these fatalistic narratives is Vizenor's notion of "survivance," which he defines as "an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion; survivance is the continuance of stories" ("Aesthetics of Survivance," in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, ed. Gerald Vizenor [Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008], 1). Though Vizenor uses the term survivance principally to recover the stories, traditions, and identities of Native American cultures from Euro-American "simulations of dominance," his critical inquiries are more broadly applicable to the exploitation of the environment by many of the same policies, agents, strategies, and technologies that were put to use to propagate and promote state-sponsored ideologies of uniformity, homogeneity, and monoculturalism throughout the American Midwest. "Prairie survivance" is thus an attempt to make the prairie a presence, not an absence, in mainstream environmental discourse and debate, including the study of American literature and the fields of environmental criticism (or ecocriticism), place studies, and cultural geography. My argument begins with a critique of Euro-American travel narratives popularized throughout the nineteenth-century by the likes of Washington Irving, George Catlin, "Buffalo Bill" Cody, and others. These travel narratives perpetuated the trope of the "vanishing prairie" by employing stock images and narrative techniques, none more pervasive than the bison hunt. Specifically, the dramatic hunt sequences of these travel narratives reinforced the eradication of the bison from the ecological prairie. However, the consequences of these narratives are not limited to the time of their writing; instead, the "lost landscape" image of the prairie remains persistent to this day as a direct result of its misrepresentation in the travel literature of the nineteenth century. The second half of my argument entails a reading of counternarratives that envision a much different past, present, and future for the prairie. The bison's recovery in narratives by Luther Standing Bear, James Welch, N. Scott Momaday, and Mary Oliver is one example in which the fate of the prairie is not limited to its inevitable demise. Moreover, I have coined the term "aesthetics of restoration" to describe the prairie's presence in the work of Aldo Leopold, Paul Gruchow, Annie Proulx, and Linda Hogan (among others), each of whom overturns nihilistic images of the prairie as a "lost landscape" by writing about its restoration and permanent return to the landscapes of the American Midwest. Narrative's potential for healing is realized in these examples, a cornerstone of narrative ethics.

My research traces the evolution of the French vision of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas by establishing a genealogy of mythic paradigms which frame how French and Quebecois authors understand the Amerindian from 1534 to present. Myth informs French visions of the Amerindian from the earliest periods of contact until the present day. My research reveals the existence of a mythic representational genealogy in the history of French (and Quebecois) letters. Through the written word, reiterations of mythologies of the Native lead to the creation of a crystallized French cultural imaginary of the Amerindian which circumscribes possibilities for reciprocal understandings between French (European) and Native peoples. The Noble and Ignoble Savage, the Ecological Savage (which I also refer to as the nexus of Nature and Native), the Vanishing Indian, and Going Native are the mythologies and narrative technologies that have mediated (and continue to mediate) French thinking about the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Not only have these mythic paradigms determined literary representation, but they have also inordinately influenced the articulation of scientific truth about the Amerindian and the concretization of Native ontological difference from a Eurocentric perspective. The inextricable link between representation and praxis, confirmed by my insights into the mythic origins of scientific discourses (Buffon, Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss), cannot be underemphasized. The original myths in that genealogy are the Ignoble and Noble Savage. The Ignoble Savage myth presents the Amerindian as non-human, animal, or monster, in both moral and physical descriptions. The Noble Savage is an idealized portrait of the purity and innocence of Native peoples that Europeans connect to a simpler time and way of life, often seen as belonging to the past. Texts written by Michel de Montaigne and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are instrumental in the creation and propagation of this myth. An important consequence of the Noble and Ignoble Savage myths is an association of the Native with Nature in the French mind, what I refer to as the French cultural imaginary of the Amerindian. The link between the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Nature is a recurring theme in French texts that represent the Amerindian. The mythologies of the Noble and Ignoble Savage, including the association of the Amerindian with the environment or world of the non-human animal, influence early modern philosophical, religious, scientific and literary images of the Amerindian in French. In the nineteenth century, the mythic paradigm of the Vanishing Indian becomes the prevailing vision of the Amerindian. Originating in the Noble Savage, the myth of the Vanishing Indian presents the Native as extinct or nearing extinction; images are often characterized by nostalgia and guilt. The inevitability of the disappearance of the Amerindian is a logic that informs representations of the Native in Chateaubriand’s writing and in French Western novels. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, French and Quebecois authors engage in the myth of Going Native. Following the metaphorical disappearance of the Amerindian according to the Vanishing Indian framework, French and French-Canadian characters undertake journeys of self-actualization that are catalyzed by contact with the (myths of the) Native. Through mythologized knowledge of the Native, non-Native characters are transformed into truer versions of themselves. Representations of androgynous and homosexual Native sexualities are significant elements in many narratives of Going Native, which I interpret through a queer critique. In addition to literary forays, my dissertation focuses on how myths of the Native are presented in French texts that claim to produce scientific truth. In the eighteenth century, the field of natural history uses images of the Native that echo the logic of the Ignoble Savage myth. In the nineteenth century, one of the foundational texts of the discipline of sociology utilizes images of Amerindian gender ambiguity to formulate a distinction between primitive and modern peoples. In my conclusion, I examine how the mythologies traced throughout the study influence the father of structural anthropology in his text Tristes tropiques.

Recent interest in environmental crises has inspired literary critics to consider how the history of ideas shapes our current ecological debates. Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream sets the stage for assessing how Renaissance attitudes towards nature have influenced current ideologies. While the play appears to be a fantasy, it reveals a relationship with nature, both physically and figuratively. The play's excursion into the woods shows an attempt to heal human relationships. Shakespeare's use of the imagery of nature argues in favor of the green world, for it is a world inhabited by shadows and shamen -- or, as Shakespeare calls them, fairies. A key element for ecocritics concerns the apparent silence of nature in literature and other cultural forms. Christopher Manes' article, "Nature and Silence," alerts readers to nature's lack of voice as a symptom of humanism, especially of theories such as the Great Chain of Being, which place nature in a subordinate role to humans, giving homo sapiens the dubious power to speak for nature. I wish to present Shakespeare's fairies as the speakers of the forest and of nature's values, according to the Early Modern period. By liberating fairies from demonic associations, Shakespeare's forest appears to us as inviting and healing. Furthermore, I argue that the pastoral tradition, which informs the Early Modern attitude towards nature, is superceded by picaresque and shamanic figures within the text. These elements allow for a subversive understanding of nature and our relationship to it. If humans adapted to their environment by developing consciousness, what has been the effect of that consciousness on their environment? Shakespeare's forest and fairies help to confront this issue because they restore human awareness to a healthy state of consciousness. By showing fairies in this light, Shakespeare provocatively proposes that humans "mend" their relationship to their surroundings as well as their own human relationships.

Place theory examines the relationship between human identity and physical locations, asking how meaningful attachments are formed between people and the spots they visit or in which they live. Literature of place exhibits this relationship and the myriad ways humans connect to their environment through storytelling, both fictional and nonfictional. Florida literature, an emerging and dynamic genre, features characters, cultures, and histories heavily embedded in place. Florida’s places also abound with animal presences, and literature about Florida almost always illustrates significant human-animal interactions that drive plots and character development. Therefore, Florida literature invites consideration of how animals influence human attachment to the land in stories written by Florida authors. Scholarly attention has noted the important relationships formed by humans and animals in literature about Florida, but no extensive study incorporating place theory, ecocriticism, and close reading has been done on the literary representation of Florida animals or their contribution to the state’s diverse reputations. This dissertation brings together theories about place attachment, ecocriticism, and critical animal studies (CAS) to illustrate the roles of fictional and nonfictional animals in works by six Florida authors: William Bartram, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Elizabeth Bishop, Rachel Carson, and John Henry Fleming. These works contain prominent animal characters that illuminate four ways of seeing Florida: idyllic Florida, wild Florida, opportunistic Florida, and mysterious Florida. These identities build off historical views about Florida as place: explorers, tourists, and developers projected their hopes for advancement onto the state based on its reputation as an exotic paradise, wild hinterland, or untouched beacon for industry and agriculture. Literature helped to produce these ideas about Florida through travel writing, but Florida stories also critique opportunistic ideologies responsible for harming animals and the environment. Literature can also preserve Florida’s mysteries and myths, offering narratives about nature and animals that challenge notions of human superiority. Thus, literature enacts a dynamic engagement with the four faces of Florida I discuss. Florida animals are vital to the construction of these four identities. For example, Henry Bunk, the protagonist of Douglas’s Alligator Crossings, sees the Everglades as an idyllic alternative to the city for its many birds and fish. Rawlings depicts Cross Creek as a wild host to deadly snakes, predatory big cats, and ubiquitous insects. Bishop captures through poetry the ordinary activity of Florida fishing in such a way that invites us to question the harm inflicted on animals for the opportunity of recreation. Fleming’s stories suggest that exploration, industry, and science have mostly erased the mysteries of Florida’s natural world, but his enigmatic and monstrous animals, along with their ties to the land, offer hope for reviving a meaningful attachment to the land. This dissertation connects literary representations of animals to real forms of violence occurring in Florida today, including fishing, caged hunting, and animal captivity. The works examined herein can prompt readers to rethink their own relationships to place and to nonhuman nature. As a cultural force, literature holds the potential for effecting change in our world. Beginning with the local is one way of witnessing this potential for the dynamic interplay between literature and place.

This dissertation looks at the ways in which humans interact with and respond to other humans and nonhumans in Ann Radcliffe's and Mary Shelley's novels. I argue that in light of the social and political turmoil surrounding the French Revolution, Radcliffe and Shelley call not so much for Revolution or drastic reform but for a change in the ways in which individuals respond to the needs of others, both human and nonhuman, and take responsibility for each other. The ways in which humans interact with the nonhuman inform the positive and negative practices that they should use to interact with other humans and vice versa. Chapter One considers the connection between nature and culture in Radcliffe'sA Sicilian Romance, The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian to argue that Radcliffe's "explained supernatural" occupies a liminal space between nature and culture. Furthermore, some of the upper class are able to discern that the "real," or material, supernatural does not exist while still acknowledging that some form of spiritual supernatural presence is possible, thus reflecting a heightened awareness of concepts beyond the material. Chapter Two looks at Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian to argue that characters who are able to appreciate nature, particularly landscape, are more admirable than those who ignore it. Specifically, these characters indicate an openness to forming reciprocal relationships with the landscapes, allowing the views offered by the landscapes to offer them peace or comfort while simultaneously respecting the power the landscapes hold. Drawing from the theories of place theorists Tim Cresswell and Yi-Fu Tuan, this chapter posits that landscapes can be classified as being on the verge of place. Chapter Three looks at Frankenstein and The Last Man to argue that Shelley demonstrates the types of reciprocal relationships people should form with both humans and nonhumans. Donna Haraway's idea of "contact zones"--places where the human and nonhuman can communicate--inform this reading of the relationships between the human and nonhuman in these two novels. It investigates how Victor Frankenstein and the creature define "human" and then asserts that in Frankenstein the creature cannot form a place for communication with any of the humans whose acceptance and companionship he seeks because no one is willing to do so. The Last Man's Lionel Verney, on the other hand, is able to form reciprocal relationships with both the human and the nonhuman, thus enabling him to ultimately become the "last man." The fourth and final chapter looks at Shelley's Valperga, Lodore, and The Last Man, set in the past, present, and future, respectively, arguing that Shelley uses these different time settings in order to demonstrate that many of the struggles people have are similar to ones that others had in the past and will continue to have in the future if people do not adjust the ways in which they respond to disaster. By presenting readers with specifics about location and environment, Shelley creates settings that readers can connect to and then entertain the idea that these characters' struggles are like their own.

Denna uppsats ämnar med hjälp av av teorier från ekokritik och posthumanism besvara frågorna hur Mary Shelley i sin roman skildrar relationen mellan natur och människa, samt hur man med utgångspunkt i Frankensteins monster (i uppsatsen refererad till som Skapelsen) kan diskutera begreppet människa. Med ekokritik menas här att studera det mänskliga jämfört med det ickemänskliga samt att också diskutera detta mänskliga, vilket är en av huvudpoängerna inom posthumanism. Den vetenskapssyn och natursyn som var gällande på Mary Shelleys tid var antropocentrisk, en världsåskådning som alltid utgår ifrån människan, och som oftast ger människan högre status än allt annat. I romanen skildras detta genom Kapten Waltons syn på sitt upptäcktsresande, och Victor Frankensteins önskan att besegra döden, eller naturen, genom att skapa en ny varelse, för vilket han får plikta med sitt liv, då han inte klarar det hårda klimatet vid Nordpolen. Det blir alltså naturen som dödar honom. I detta kan ses Mary Shelleys kritik mot ett oansvarigt utforskande av naturen och dess processer. Vid försök att diskutera konceptet människa kan upptäckas att en definition lätt motarbetas genom att inte alla människor passar in på denna definition, och att det också kan finnas andra varelser som helt eller delvis gör det. Saken kompliceras dessutom av att en maskin, en robot, eller en artificiell intelligens, numera kan fungera mycket likt en hjärna, och att den mänskliga hjärnan beskrivs som en serie elektrokemiska impulser. Vi leds att acceptera Derridas tanke att människa inte är något som går att definiera. Även denna diskussion kan ses som antropocentrisk, vilket är en av svårigheterna; att bortse från sin egen kulturs världsåskådning. / The main focus of this essay is to attempt to answer the questions of how Mary Shelley, in her novel Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, portrays the relationship between man and nature, and how Frankensteins creature can serve as a starting point in a discussion of the term human. The theories of ecocriticism - here described as the study of the relationship between human and nonhuman - and poshumanism, which contains the premisses for discussing this human, reveal many interesting things about the novel. The scientific approach to the world, and by extension, nature, can in Shelleys novel be considered anthropocentric, which is portrayed as a damaging world-view. Attempts to discuss the concept of human reveals that any definition can be met with resistence and objections. Not all humans meet the criteria of a certain definition, and there may be other creatures that do. The conclusion here may be that the human simply cannot be defined properly.

Gardens played a significant role in the lives of European peoples living in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By producing texts in which gardens and other cultivated landscapes are used as symbol and setting, medieval writers provide us with the opportunity to gain insight into the sociocultural conventions associated with these spaces in the late medieval period. By building our understanding of medieval horticulture through an examination of historical texts, we position ourselves to achieve a greater understanding into the formation of contemporary cultivated literary landscapes and their attendant conventional codes. This study provides a map of current medieval garden interpretation, assessing the shape and validity of recent literary criticism of this field. With a focus on the hortus conclusus (the walled pleasure garden) and arboricultural spaces (including hunting and pleasure parks), this study provides an historicist reinterpretation of horticultural landscapes in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Sir Orfeo, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, furthering our understanding of the authors’ use of such conventionally-coded spaces in these canonical romances.

Gardens played a significant role in the lives of European peoples living in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By producing texts in which gardens and other cultivated landscapes are used as symbol and setting, medieval writers provide us with the opportunity to gain insight into the sociocultural conventions associated with these spaces in the late medieval period. By building our understanding of medieval horticulture through an examination of historical texts, we position ourselves to achieve a greater understanding into the formation of contemporary cultivated literary landscapes and their attendant conventional codes. This study provides a map of current medieval garden interpretation, assessing the shape and validity of recent literary criticism of this field. With a focus on the hortus conclusus (the walled pleasure garden) and arboricultural spaces (including hunting and pleasure parks), this study provides an historicist reinterpretation of horticultural landscapes in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Sir Orfeo, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, furthering our understanding of the authors’ use of such conventionally-coded spaces in these canonical romances.