This paper aims to examine a selection of early American literature from an ecocritical perspective: Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-82)’s “Nature” (1836), Mary Rowlandson(c. 1636-1711)’s A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-64)’s “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), and Caroline Kirkland(1801-64)’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? Or Glimpses of Western Life (1839). These works were selected to represent the variety of views on nature that early Americans had―i.e., from the Puritan association of the natural wilderness with evil, through the metaphysical sublimation of nature in transcendentalism, to the realistic and pragmatic treatment of nature. The process of rethinking the early American notions of nature may possibly reveal the cultural rationale behind the present environmental crisis of American society.
This paper aims to examine a selection of early American literature from an ecocritical perspective: Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-82)’s “Nature” (1836), Mary Rowlandson(c. 1636-1711)’s A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-64)’s “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), and Caroline Kirkland(1801-64)’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? Or Glimpses of Western Life (1839). These works were selected to represent the variety of views on nature that early Americans had―i.e., from the Puritan association of the natural wilderness with evil, through the metaphysical sublimation of nature in transcendentalism, to the realistic and pragmatic treatment of nature. The process of rethinking the early American notions of nature may possibly reveal the cultural rationale behind the present environmental crisis of American society.
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