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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
American Transcendental Vision: Emerson To Chaplin, Bill R. Scalia
American Transcendental Vision: Emerson To Chaplin, Bill R. Scalia
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Ralph Waldo Emerson's publication of Nature in 1836 began a process of creating a new condition of American thinking, severed from European cultural and intellectual influences. The subsequent lectures The American Scholar and The Divinity School Address furthered this process, calling for an original American literature. Emerson's writing called consistently for poets with the ability to "see" past the material, apparent world to the world of eternal forms, which shaped nature in accordance with a divine moral imperative. Through this connection, man-as-poet would discover God in himself. In short, Emerson effectively transferred divinity from Unitarian doctrine to the individual, thereby …
Clear-Cutting Eden: Representations Of Nature In Southern Fiction, 1930-1950, Christopher B. Rieger
Clear-Cutting Eden: Representations Of Nature In Southern Fiction, 1930-1950, Christopher B. Rieger
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation examines how Southern literary representations of the natural world were influenced by, and influenced, the historical, social, and ecological changes of the 1930s and 1940s. Specifically, I examine the ways that nature is conceived of and portrayed by four authors of this era: Erskine Caldwell, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner; through their works, I investigate the intersections of race, class, and gender with the natural environment. I argue that during this time of profound regional and national upheaval there exists a climate of professed binary oppositions and that these authors’ representations of nature in …