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Seeing The God Of New Mexico: Mary Austin's Starry Adventure And The Optic Of Enchantment, Olivia Jayne Mann

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines 20th century American writer Mary Austin's last novel, Starry Adventure (1931), a work unjustly ignored by most Austin scholars, yet touted by the photographer Ansel Adams (in a letter to Austin) as "the greatest thing I have ever read." This thesis will be particularly concerned with the concept of vision in the novel and the connections between Austin's fiction and the New Mexican modernism/primitivism movement in the visual arts. I explore what I call Austin's "optic of enchantment," a visual experience of divinity that is uniquely tied to the New Mexican landscape. I break down this optic …