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Conceptualizing Nature: New England Nature Writers, Robert Pinkham

Honors Theses

This thesis examines five New England nature writers and their works from three distinct historical literary periods―William Cullen Bryant’s poetry from the era before industrialism (up to 1830); Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays (1841-1844) and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) from the Industrial Revolution (1830-1860); and finally Robert Frost’s poetry and Henry Beston’s The Outermost House (1929) from the modernist period (1920-1950). These writers are connected by a shared and intense love of nature; however, because they write during different moments in history, their approaches to and definitions of “nature” vary. This thesis engages with these writers and their times in …