| Although this study concentrates mainly on Thoreau and his writings, its more general and ultimate purpose is to help explore and define the genre of nature writing, with particular attention to the role of eros--the all-but-literal sexual bond that nature writers establish with their environments. Of the six principal chapters, four are devoted to the earlier works of Thoreau, up through Walden. The first chapter, preceding these, examines the genre of nature writing in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas about narrative, realism, and the Bildungsroman, then tests these ideas against Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and, by way of instructive contrast, John Wesley Powell's The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, concluding that genres such as the travel narrative cannot legitimately be isolated formally from that of nature writing. The next four chapters explore the question how eros shapes the attitudes, form, and imagery of nature writing, with particular attention to Thoreau's essay "Walking," A Week (treated more fully than in the first chapter), and Walden. The sixth and final chapter, following the middle ones on Thoreau, examines Isabella Bird's A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, where the feminine viewpoint of an English woman replaces the male viewpoints of the Americans Powell and Thoreau and topography embodying the Sublime replaces the historically rich but relatively domesticated New England landscapes.; Besides trying to refine the definition of nature writing in formal terms having to do with narrative movement and through the affective dynamics of eros, the author of the present study argues that nature writing, like eros, typically has both a bright and a dark side. Although sexual attitudes and images in nature writing convey effectively the warmth and transport of union with the Other, they can also take the more sinister form of a ravishment of the earth, thus reflecting what is worst along with what is best in sexual archetypes and human relationships. |
