Painted deserts: The literature and art of America's national parks

A prominent quality of American nature writing, when it engages a landscape undamaged by humans, is its celebratory tone, and early writing on the national parks shares this tone. During the twentieth century, however, celebration is slowly edged out of texts about the parks by another conspicuous quality of American nature writing: anger, in this case anger that approaches rage. Why should such pleasant retreats provoke such a response? We might assume that this reaction arises from physical damage to the parks, but I argue that it comes of outraged idealism.; This dissertation examines the practice, exhibited by a wide range of authors, of conceptualizing the national parks as works of art. Beginning in the 1860s and continuing to the present day, I analyze both the origins of this practice and its recent consequences. My first two chapters focus on both early writing (by Clarence King, John Muir, and others) and early visual art (by Thomas Moran, William Henry Jackson, etc.). These texts create an aesthetic in which the American West is divided into canonical and noncanonical landscapes; the new national parks are the high canon. The parks are thus textualized, and I use some of the insights of new historicism to show that a circulation develops between the human and the landscape texts, each creating the other; ultimately, high cultural prestige is conferred on the parks.; My final three chapters examine how both later nature writers (Edward Abbey, Rick Bass, and others) and writers of the wider literary canon respond to this aesthetic ideal. These later generations behold the parks overrun by automotive tourists, a sort of pastoral booboisie uninterested in art. The anger follows—but it arises largely out of aesthetics. I prove my overall hypothesis by close reading, especially of each author's use of metaphor. I also include brief interchapters based on my personal experience. I spent most of five years living inside Yellowstone National Park, and the interchapters apply this experience to the major themes of the dissertation.