James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans has had a remarkable impact on American culture and modern critics have often viewed it as a myth of America itself. Cooper’s highly romanticized narrative has partly been seen as the less-than-historical “wish-fulfillment” (D.H. Lawrence) of an author who socialized in the salons of New York and Paris but dreamt of noble savages in the untamed American landscape but also as an expression of America’s difficulties in coming to terms with its conquest of the Indians. As a complement to these views, this essay attempts to show that the character Natty Bumppo, or Hawkeye, represents the new nation’s ambivalent relationship with the surrounding wilderness and therefore helplessly torn between vastly different ideals. On one hand, Hawkeye appears to show us a less confrontational way of relating to the wilderness: one that implies the possibility for man to transform himself and live in spiritual unity with nature—a notion that would make Hawkeye the forerunner of the ideals put forth in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay “Nature”. But Hawkeye’s relationship with the woods and the Indians is complex, self-contradictory and filled with deep inner struggles, and he is at other times a merciless figure who divides Indians into good and bad. As such, his very character seems to be the embodiment of an American identity that is highly conflicted. In addition to examining the novel’s depiction of Hawkeye, the Indians and the forest, the essay offers a wide historical perspective of the ideas of nature that were present or just emerging in Cooper’s time, including those expressed by Emerson, as well as their Romantic and Christian influences. By understanding how Americans struggled to deal with feelings of guilt and sorrow in the face of the perceived decline of the wilderness in the 19th century, we might better understand the persisting importance of Cooper’s work.

Thesis advisor: Jeremiah McGrann / The effect of transcendentalism on American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) is examined in this study. Certain pieces in Ives' 114 Songs collection are musically analyzed to better understand Ives' interpretation of three main tenets of transcendentalism (the individual, the past, and nature). Scholarly criticism and a historical background of transcendentalism are discussed as well. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2004. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Music. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 319-335). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1905. / Vita. Published also without thesis note. Bibliography: p. [105]-107.

Spontaneous feeling has been a cornerstone of Romantic aesthetics since Wordsworth wrote his Preface to Lyrical Ballads. This dissertation unsettles the link between Romantic poetry and the overflow of emotion by arguing that writers from Wordsworth to Emerson persistently turned to Stoicism in reconsidering the role of the passions in both literature and the conduct of life. Drawing on poetry and a broad range of journals, letters, and intellectual prose, I argue that the Romantics were attuned to the way diffuse Stoic attitudes informed the politics and moral psychology of their age. More than a prompt for resignation or acquiescence, Stoicism was a radical and controversial term in a revolutionary age; philosophers like Kant, Spinoza, and Godwin drew on Stoic accounts of the passions in articulating their new ethical systems. In chapters on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Emerson, I argue that the period most polemically invested in emotion as the mainspring of art was also captivated by the idea that aesthetic and ethical judgment demanded a transcendence of emotion. In their poetic search for "confirmed tranquillity," the writers in my transatlantic study transformed Stoicism's austerities as they confronted the limitations of sympathy and redefined their own relations to a cosmopolitan and war-torn world.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1995. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Alayne Sullivan. Dissertation Committee: Lucy McCormick Calkins. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 179-182).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1938. / Typescript. Includes abstract and vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 656-677).

Thesis (M.A.)--Cleveland State University, 2009. / Abstract. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Sept. 8, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-95). Available online via the OhioLINK ETD Center and also available in print.

Thesis (PH. D.)--Columbia University, 1905. / Vita. Published also without thesis note. Bibliography: p. [105]-107. Also available in digital form on the Internet Archive Web site.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1904. / Vita. Published also without thesis note. Bibliography: p. [105]-107.