The Ecological Conscience And Ambivalence Of The Nineteenth-Century American Novelists

With the king novelists James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville and Mark Twain in the nineteenth century the core of the studies, this thesis rediscovers their ecological conscience which is contained in the three novelists' respective masterpieces The Pioneers, Typee and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to frame the picture of nature-respecting and environment-protecting as a literary ecosystem. The thesis also reveals that there is an unavoidable kind of ambivalence in the nineteenth-century American novel-composing: the interwoven love and fear for Nature, and the conflicts between the pursuit of the material civilization and yearning for keeping a pure paradise.