Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
The Joys Of Earth: Evolutionary Kinship In Victorian Atheist And Agnostic Authors, Keri R. Stevenson
The Joys Of Earth: Evolutionary Kinship In Victorian Atheist And Agnostic Authors, Keri R. Stevenson
Theses and Dissertations--English
Darwin’s evolutionary theory provided, for some atheist and agnostic authors in Victorian England, a theory of kinship and community, of investment in the world, that had been missing before. Without a “creation” story that could match the Biblical version, those who stood outside the dominant Christian paradigm rarely had the words or concepts to construct their own visions of how humans fit into the existence of other species, into landscapes, and into a world that, if unfallen, seemed resistant to other explanations. Those who did construct alternate mythologies usually reared them on a Christian base.
Into the Victorian loss of …
Narrating Rewilding: Shifting Images Of Wilderness In American Literature, Aaron Andrew Cloyd
Narrating Rewilding: Shifting Images Of Wilderness In American Literature, Aaron Andrew Cloyd
Theses and Dissertations--English
Narrating Rewilding analyzes interactions between imaginative writings and environmental histories to ask how novels and creative nonfiction contribute to conversations of wilderness rewilding. I identify aspects of rewilding in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, and Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge within a context of William Cronon’s and James Feldman’s works of environmental history, and I argue that the selected imaginative works offer alternative ramifications of rewilding by questioning Cronon’s and Feldman’s anthropocentric basis.
While Cronon and Feldman argue that a rewilding wilderness expresses interconnections between human history and expressions of nature, and that a return of …