Role of landscape in American Literature

[Ozzma]

I am currently in an American Lit class. The topic is the role of the natural landscape in America by comparing certain works studied in class. Some of the works are Edgar Huntly by Charles Brown, and R.W. Emerson's, Nature, The American Scholar, Self-Reliance, The Poet . There is also M. Fuller's The Great Lawsuit , Thoreau's Resistance to Civil Govt and a few works by Whitman. We've also touched on Puritan and Pilgrim writings (Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather) of early pre-American literature as well as writings from the Founding Fathers (Ben Franklin, Crevecouer, Thomas Paine ,Thomas Jefferson .etc).

I must devise a thesis on the works studied in class, but I need help getting the ball rolling here.

All input is appreciated.

[PeterL]

I don't know if you have specfic landscape in miind, but other than the frontier spirit and those matters derived from it there wasn't any consistent meaning for landscape. Landscape varies a great deal, and its meaning can vary with it.

If I were taking something from the works you cited, then I would try to follow the development of self-reliance and individuality from Paine and Jefferson through Emerson and Thoreau. You could even pull in some more recent works and folow it through American history. Or, you could look at the change in the individual in politics and bring in the Tea Party and relate it to Obama being re-elected.

[Ozzma]

I don't know if you have specfic landscape in miind, but other than the frontier spirit and those matters derived from it there wasn't any consistent meaning for landscape. Landscape varies a great deal, and its meaning can vary with it.

If I were taking something from the works you cited, then I would try to follow the development of self-reliance and individuality from Paine and Jefferson through Emerson and Thoreau. You could even pull in some more recent works and folow it through American history. Or, you could look at the change in the individual in politics and bring in the Tea Party and relate it to Obama being re-elected.


That's very much the sort of thing I plan on doing. I plan on going through history and explaining how the symbolic value of nature changed over the years in America. At first, Nature was feared, it was wild, savage, unknown (Edgar Huntly, Cotton Mather, Mary Rowlandson) and then progress from then into Paine, Jefferson, Emerson and finally Thoreau.

[OrphanPip]

Depends on the length and scope of your paper. That's not a bad starting point, but it does sound very broad for an undergrad paper, you could fall into the trap of saying a whole lot that is ultimately superficial. I would advise narrowing your scope to a specific aspect of that "symbolic value of nature." Is there a particular symbol that you see as repeated and modified in some of those works? Colonial American literature is far outside my range of expertise, but a prominent focus in Canadian literature of the period would be winter. Just as a hypothetical, a focused discussion of how depictions of winter reflect changes in attitudes towards nature is better than a general overview of attitudes towards nature. I would also try to avoid basing your analysis in more than 2 or 3 primary texts, instead use secondary sources to ground the changing cultural contexts and an analysis of a few of the primary works to illustrate how these broader context are revealed in literature.

[PeterL]

That's very much the sort of thing I plan on doing. I plan on going through history and explaining how the symbolic value of nature changed over the years in America. At first, Nature was feared, it was wild, savage, unknown (Edgar Huntly, Cotton Mather, Mary Rowlandson) and then progress from then into Paine, Jefferson, Emerson and finally Thoreau.


So you are writing a 50,000 word piece. That's a lot of work, so you should try to get it published.

You would be better off if you focussed it a little more.

[kelby_lake]

The land in general seems to be a big thing in American Lit. It's not simply nature but the land itself. Consider that bit in Gone With The Wind where Ashley hands Scarlett the red dirt from Tara and she gains her identity through that. So personally I would look at how the land shapes American identity.

[JBI]

The land in general seems to be a big thing in American Lit. It's not simply nature but the land itself. Consider that bit in Gone With The Wind where Ashley hands Scarlett the red dirt from Tara and she gains her identity through that. So personally I would look at how the land shapes American identity.

The land is big in any variation or similar thing to the Western genre - that is all Westerns pretty much, all Martial arts novels, many fantasy novels, many samurai novels, much of Canadian fiction, etc.

It's a convention of the landscape is equivalent to the parallel human or national journey from infancy into the unknown.

[kelby_lake]

The land is big in any variation or similar thing to the Western genre - that is all Westerns pretty much, all Martial arts novels, many fantasy novels, many samurai novels, much of Canadian fiction, etc.

It's a convention of the landscape is equivalent to the parallel human or national journey from infancy into the unknown.

Yes, but it seems to be particularly prominent in American Lit, which has a very strong patriotism (or sometimes anti-patriotism).

[JBI]

Yes, but it seems to be particularly prominent in American Lit, which has a very strong patriotism (or sometimes anti-patriotism).

It comes from the fact that the land was "settled" instead of "conquered". In the British tradition, there is a history of the unknown represented by the pastoral psyche behind King Arthur and the Medieval Britannia cycles of national mythology. You guys are a conquered island, keep in mind, not a settled land. France is similar.

Italy comes closer, with the Trojan - Aeneid cycle being prominent, but the geography doesn't allow the same thing as what happens in somewhere like China or the United States, or Canada. The idea of "Wilderness" or of the unknown world - basically a frontier - is relatively impossible in Europe, given the small size and the settlement patterns. There is no sense of the unknown, really, unless you move outward, like Marco Polo, or you move into the exotic, like anything dealing with the "Orient" or the Islamic world - even Moorish Spain is an orient, of sorts, except that it lacks exotic landscape, in that it was far more refined and developed than its Christian neighbor.

In the US, however, you have basically a landscape without a developed civilization in terms of settlements - the locals are scattered, and often nomadic, the land is uncharted and vast, and the people are exiles into the unknown - the world of the garden of Eden.

Take somewhere like Utah for instance - you have a new religion settling (Mormonism, which is the most American of religions), and it is taken root in the new land (Utah, or the US), with an unconquered, relatively unsettled geography. It's no wonder that everything is given religious significance, and the landscape is featured heavily. It is a new world, in a sense of the imagination.

The 18th century United States basically lacked the west. California wasn't even really developed by English speaking Americans until gold was found, and commerce furthered with the Pacific. In between is a vast geography of land, relatively uninhibited, except for a romanticized barbarian-like people (in terms of the american imagination), who are both free spirits of the romantic unknown, and violent savages of a primitive age. Of course this landscape will reflect in literature.

The idea of the frontier then becomes new - the unknown land - no roads, no water for many stretches, barbarian people, cactus, etc. - followed by expansion outward. The war between North and South was really a war between Eastern north and Eastern South, keep in mind - the far west even at that point was unsettled. within all the chaos though, people ventured outward into the frontier, they settled, they expanded, they murdered and conquered, and they charted. Yet the one thing they noticed is the striking beauty and variance of the land there, which, uninhabited as they saw it, reflected itself in a new form of writing - the Western.

The Chinese equivalent is similar, except that the West is not unsettled, but rather wild, as is the north. Even in the earliest Book of Poetry we see its presence, but it is more of an ethnic difference (to this day the West is still widely a place of ethnic dispute and violence), yet it is also the place of exile. Poets would go this way into exile, never to be seen again, or would be sent to the frontier to guard, manage, or serve out a sentence.

By the time this hit the 20th century, historical writers ran with the idea, especially Jin Yong, who puts landscape in the forefront - Mongols to the North, Muslims to the West, Tibetans to the South-West, Bai-Nanzhao-Dali people to the immediate south, and even south culture and north culture divided up. The size of the country allows for this, in that even today every province is relatively different culturally. The vast landscape also factors in - you have canal towns in the mid-east, and vast desert in the North West, vast mountain ranges and wild rivers. You can also play with old conceits - the wild rushing river yangtze blasting through the dangerous three gorges, twisting and thrashing (now dammed, and a slow flowing lake), or the capital cities of the great culture centres - Hangzhou with beautiful women, fine tea, good food, and all its calligraphy and poetry, Beijing with its low-cities and walled off Forbidden city, etc.

You see what I mean? The closest thing Europe comes to a landscape of this magnitude is Mount Blanc, which, ironically, Wordsworth found uninspiring in his Prelude (he passed over it and barely noticed, realizing it isn't that daunting). The Sea in the North of the British isles itself is a form of landscape, but that of course has been seen in British culture - the best example is Wordsworth's Elegiac Stanzas (what I regard his best poem, and perhaps the best elegy in the language).

Then there is another issue. The medieval through Enlightenment ages were hardly those of nature and the natural world being of importance. The renaissance particularly was very anti-nature. The idea of humanism, in its original thought, is that human rationalization and civilization brings the human out of the natural world into the civilized world. The aristocratic legacies and organization of the world feed this. In renaissance paintings, the scenery slowly disappears in favor of architecture - Michelangelo does away with nature almost altogether - it is civilization that is fore-fronted.

Nature as significant comes in at the middle-end of the 18th century in Europe, and takes over in the Romantic period. Until then, I cannot think of any poet who actually takes it seriously. There is a bit of use of nature, and it crosses a lot with the sublime in late 18th century works, but for the most part it is education, civilization, cultivation, and human rationalization that are in the forefront.

The US, in contrast, was established in a romantic age (in the sense that the majority of it was settled after Romanticism took hold of the imagination), so it is easy to see how the ideas of that age could play into the imagination. Likewise the idea of the sublime in scenery had also already taken root. Lewis and Clark was as much a Romantic expedition as it was scientific. Combined with the myth of the new Eden - the post-apocalyptic world of the US, this was all the more available for exploitation in literature.

My favorite example would be Mr. Wilderness John Muir. Think of the timing of his writing - post-civil war, pre-World Wars, California post-gold rush, etc. It's all there for the form of nature we understand. He is writing after it has been settled, but he is writing as it is disappearing - he says we must preserve it, he wanders off into it for months at a time. This is the lasting effect, in a nutshell, of the romantic imagination of the wilderness in the midst of modernization. We follow this model, even though we still may experience the former model. Once the buffalo and the Natives have been exterminated, there is only the John Muir model left. The English never even managed to preserve that much.

[Eiseabhal]

Isn't the landscape very important to McCarthy too and quite a number of the non-fiction writers also.