Blend Of Natural And Spiritual

Since the middle of the 1980's, there has been a new surge of an important American writing focusing on the relationship between human beings and the natural world ?the American Nature Writing. This dissertation attempts to explore its origins, development, and the present situation.The dissertation is divided into five chapters, besides the introduction and the coda. The introduction part " Retelling the Story of the Land" serves as a brief description of the American nature writing, concerning its features and definition, origins and development, identifying the special traits of a genre that derives from a foundational concept of America as "nature's nation".The following chapters select representative authors and their works from different historical periods, so as to illustrate the forming of the American nature writing tradition, while presenting a vivid picture of the genre's emergence and growth, as well as its fresh and changing style.Chapter One "The American Myth in the New World" dates back to the origins of the American nature writing. Writers such as John Smith and William Bradford in colonial America of the seventeenth century saw the New Land as either "an abundant Eden" or "a hideous wilderness", making American nature a special focus of people's attention. Eighteenth-century writers John Bartram and Jonathan Edwards speculated, respectively from the perspective of scientific and spiritual light, on "the holy landscape", which enabled people to see both sides of nature梩he practical and the spiritual. William Bartram, John Bartram's son, was the first to achieve transcontinental literary fame and to become the founder of the American nature writing when he published his Travels in 1791, which described his "lonely pilgrimage" to the American wilderness. Alexander Wilson, American ornithologist and William Bartram's disciple, extended the meaning of nature in the New World by his huge work American Ornithology, imaging it in the form of the rustling of leaves, the rush of water, and the songs of birds. The aforementioned representatives and their works indicate that the founders of the theme and the style of the American nature writing emerged in the seventeenth century and eighteenth century.Chapter Two "The Spiritual Temple in Nature" shows that it was not until the early nineteenth century, with the publication of such works as Thomas Cole's Essay on American Scenery (1836) and Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature (1836), that American writers began to appreciate the landscape of the New World as an appropriate and powerful source of inspiration for both literature and art. Cole, as the founder of the American Hudson River School, saw and painted "culture in the landscape". The works of his school reflected the same idea, tone, and approach of the open-air writers of the time. Emerson pointed out that "Nature is a symbol of spirit". He made "Study nature" and "Know thyself" the eternal subject of the American nature writing.Chapter Three " The Actual Glory in the Open Air" deals with two of the great open-airAmerican writers: Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. Thoreau's lifelong devotion to his profession of observation and description of nature in works like Walden and Walking not only produced " a Concord in a human form" but also making himself "a cultural icon" for modern Americans as well. Whitman's Specimen Days, written in the open air of New Jersey, reflected the old subject of" nature as a book", becoming " an old man's last idyll".Chapter Four "The Soul's Home in the Wilderness" explores three representative American nature writers at the turn of the century: John Burroughs, John Muir, and Mary Austin. Burroughs and Muir, known respectively as "John of the birds" and "John of the mountains" were the most prolific and impressive practitioners of American nature writing of the time. Their emergence signified that nature writing has come out of the circle of Concord and moved into a new broad territory. Austin's works brought a woman's voice into the man-centered...