| Focusing on representations of wilderness in selected works by Cather, Chopin, Eliot, Faulkner, Frost, Hemingway, Hurston, Jeffers, London, and Rawlings, the dissertation seeks to understand the ways in which modernist and proto-modernist writers deploy wilderness in their fiction and poetry.; The argument begins with the anachronism of modernists' focus on wilderness in the early twentieth century: because the frontier had closed before the turn of the century, we might assume that wilderness would cease to have much relevance to American literature and American writers in the period under consideration. Although not all modernist writing is concerned with wilderness or even with nature, significant works by canonical and non-canonical pre-modernist and modernist writers do make explicit use of the wilderness to advance their plots and character development. Moreover, modernism values the use of myth and archetypes, concepts often connected to wilderness; and it focuses on the alienation of self from society, a stance that assumes concrete meaning in the wilderness, where the individual is physically separate from society. I contend that in modernist writing wilderness frequently externalizes and concretizes writers' alienated inner world. Simultaneously, wilderness can constitute an alternative to fractured society, a place where modernist characters and speakers may find meaning and experience epiphany, where they might become, in Frost's words, “whole again.”; My methodology extrapolates from the work of such standard wilderness and ecocritical scholars as Paul Shepard, Lawrence Buell, Leo Marx, Roderick Nash, Max Oelschlager and the voices represented in Cheryl Glotfelty and Harold Fromm's Ecocriticism Reader, as well as from more eclectic voices of geographer Yi-Fu Tuan and myth scholar Joseph Campbell. Framing “wilderness” in its historical meanings, the dissertation investigates the term's modernist resonances expressed via the kinetic forces of weather, attitudes of primitivism, the quest motif, and the permeability between internal and external self. It contends that for modernist writers the wilderness exists as much as a state of mind, or a reflection of the inner self, as a concrete phenomenon: the “desert places” of the modern world are immediate, “in me so much nearer home.”... |
