- Title
- “What a Place to Live”: home and wilderness in domestic American travel literature, 1835-1883
- Author
- Weaver, James A.
- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University,
English, 2006.
- Advisor
- Steven Fink
- Pages
- 257p.
- Abstract
- Focusing on the period 1835–1883, this dissertation examines how authors of nineteenth-century domestic American travel literature conceived of the relationships between ideas of the wilderness and of home. While American travel literature as a broad field has garnered a large amount of critical attention in past decade, much of that focus has been on Americans traveling abroad. As a result, texts documenting travel within the domestic United States have not received the critical attention they deserve. This dissertation seeks to address this gap in current criticism by analyzing texts by Washington Irving, Caroline Kirkland, Henry David Thoreau, George William Curtis, Bayard Taylor, Mark Twain, and Helen Hunt Jackson. In arguing that these works of domestic American travel literature redefine the wilderness as a potential home that carries both personal and national significances for these authors, I reveal the continuities not only between nineteenth-century conceptions of nature and home but also among the literary movements of the century. This dissertation adds to existing travel literature scholarship and ecocritical discussions of nineteenth-century American literature (a) by addressing a set of texts that has been undervalued for its contributions to American thinking about the relationship between humans and nature in particular and to American literary history in general; (b) by analyzing the interconnections that exist not only among these less-studied texts but also between them and their better-known fictional counterparts; and most importantly, (c) by offering a new understanding of nineteenth-century representations of the fundamental connection between the American wilderness and the home and the various roles that relationship played in American literature and culture.
- Subject Headings
- Literature, American
- Keywords
- home; wilderness; travel literature; nineteenth-century American literature
Document number: osu1149885641.
Bookmark this page as
<http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1149885641>.
