The tendency to stage appreciation for and attention to nature as a passive, guiltless enterprise was necessary for eighteenth-century colonial claims to space, but it also remains a very deeply entrenched aspect of environmentalist attitudes today. Indeed, innovations that shaped the technological interpretation and inscription of place in the latter eighteenth century have strongly situated contemporary North American environmental discourses.<p>This thesis explores the methods of spatial representation in Samuel Hearnes <i>A Journey from Prince of Waless Fort, in Hudsons Bay, to the Northern Ocean</i>(1795) and William Bartrams <i>Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, The Cherokee Country, The Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Choctaws</i> (1792). Both ecocritical and postcolonial methods underlay an analysis of the discourses and rhetorics of space exhibited in the North American travel writing of these two late-eighteenth-century writers. A first move monitors how landscape accrues not only as a product of descriptive techniques, frames, and screens, but also as a process whereby narrative identity is formed against and within a represented landscape. A second move locates these texts as versions of Mary Louise Pratts anti-conquest, in which the hero-explorer of colonial encounter is staged as both passive and innocent.<p>Two primary results from this research into the relationship between literature and environment are reported. First, according to conventions of ecocritical analysis, Hearne and Bartram implement two very different modes of spatial representation in travel narratives from the same period; in the broadest strokes, Hearnes text is deeply anthropocentric and only partially engages in eighteenth-century vogues of natural history, while Bartrams is compellingly and precociously ecocentric as well as deeply invested in the commerce of Linnaean systemizations of nature that revolutionized natural history in the period. Second, this disparity in representational method is correlated not only with variances in the ecological (or green) sensibilities of the authors, but also with distinctions in the colonial functionality of the texts, verifying that literature of place, despite the putative object of description, always already maintains significant valencies in social registers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:USASK/oai:usask.ca:etd-12182006-133143 |
| Date | 18 December 2006 |
| Creators | Milligan, Richard Anthony |
| Contributors | Vargo, Lisa, Stephanson, Raymond A., Fagan, Kristina, Bartley, William |
| Publisher | University of Saskatchewan |
| Source Sets | University of Saskatchewan Library |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://library.usask.ca/theses/available/etd-12182006-133143/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Saskatchewan or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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