The enlightened naturalist: Ecological romanticism in American literature

Interdisciplinary in focus, this dissertation uses concepts from contemporary environmental ethics and ecophilosophy to study the ways in which American romantic literature depends upon an ecological sensibility. Because the approach is informed by the emergent theoretical paradigm of ecocriticism, it shifts critical focus from social relationships toward natural relationships, and views both the author and the text in terms of ecosystemic--as well as human--patterns of organization. This project focuses upon the relationship between natural history studies and romantic literature in America, and suggests that the work of the post-Civil War nature writers represents an important continuation of the romantic literary tradition in America. By observing natural interrelationships, and appreciating the balanced complexity through which a higher principle is enacted, American romantic naturalists developed a perspective which is identified as "ecological." While nineteenth-century culture's dominant interpretation of nature was predicated upon a linear progression in which wilderness was perpetually subjugated for the benefit of human economic use, the ecological paradigm insisted instead that the proper "use" of nature be aesthetic, philosophical, religious and literary, as well as simply commercial.; In chapters on ecocritical theory, romantic natural history, Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir, this dissertation explains how the influence of natural history studies results in ecological insights which our romantic naturalists then use to redefine the American "Self" in the context of the natural community. The writers referred to as "enlightened naturalists" repudiated the "grand conceit" of anthropocentrism, insisting that humans should not rule over nature, but rather, be "part and parcel" of it. Inspired by the American land, and widely read by a nation just beginning to recognize the value of a frontier it had nearly exhausted, the enlightened naturalists catalyzed the development of cultural values which were based upon the integrative perspective of natural interrelationship. This dissertation explains how these writers helped promulgate the ecological ethos which is an important aspect of the American romantic tradition, and whose legacy is increasingly apparent in American cultural values today.