Place and landscape in Midwestern American literature

Certain authors of the American Midwest, including Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, James Wright, and Theodore Roethke, are part of a continuing American neo-Romantic tradition of literary place and landscape. These writers do more than merely describe their beloved landscapes, though they do that with poetic brilliance. Their deeper concern is how individuals and groups become or fail to become intellectually and emotionally attached to local landscapes. Asking why the land is as it now appears, they find answers in historical documentation, personal exploration of terrain, and Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity." They share, in other words, sense of place.; My first chapter deals with the larger American tradition of literary place and landscape, which true to its Romantic roots, values nature as a source of spiritual enlightenment and as a basis for democratic culture. This connection of nature, spirit, and culture lies at the heart of my second chapter, on the American Midwest and its defining myth or ideology: the pastoral ideal of a rural landscape inhabited by free-holding individuals, particularly farmers. Midwestern authors of the classic period, including Hamlin Garlin, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and Carl Sandburg, censured utilitarianism and materialism while celebrating the region's natural beauty and cultural heritage. Since the Midwest is relatively level and non-sublime, their sense of place is subtle and picturesque, attentive to juxtapositions of human and natural elements and to enclaves of wild nature within the agrarian landscape. There is an implicit environmentalism in these authors' criticism of modern industrial society. They express the perennial desire of pastoralism for a balance between society and nature, sophistication and the bucolic.; Subsequent chapters examine the writings of individual authors in relation to Midwestern place, landscape, and the pastoral ideal: Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, and James Wright. Chapter 6 considers four poets with strong attachments to the landscape of the state of Michigan: Theodore Roethke, Jim Harrison, Judith Minty, and Dan Gerber. The conclusion re-examines regionalism and sense of place as conceptual approaches to American literature.