Department or Program
English
Abstract
While literary scholarship has historically traced the origins of American environmental literature to the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century, more recent critics have identified engagement with wilderness and ecological concerns in American literature even before the emergence of Emerson and Thoreau. One such approach has been termed the ecogothic, a literary mode which emphasizes human’s repressed anxieties about the natural world and resists Enlightenment rationality and its effort to exert anthropocentric control over it. Through an analysis of texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe, this thesis will explore the early American ecogothic literary tradition from 1799-1848, and its challenge to the environmental attitudes at the foundation of American political identity. Drawing on frameworks of new historicism, new materialism, and ecogothic studies, this thesis argues that both ecophobia and ecophilia– two ostensibly opposed attitudes toward the natural world– are expressions of the same anthropocentric impulse to repress an unsettling ecological reality. The early American ecogothic frames these anxieties against the backdrop of a colonial environmental history marked by repugnance, and a post-Independence imperialist present seeking to dominate the wilderness of the American west. Using the terrifying conventions of the ecogothic to expose the fragility of the anthropocentric American political subject, these texts produce a terrifying affect which reframes anxieties of environmental control, as anxieties of environmental self control. Rather than fearing a nature which cannot be controlled, the early American ecogothic suggests we should be afraid of our inability to control our own nature.
Level of Access
Open Access
First Advisor
Osucha, Eden
Date of Graduation
5-2026
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Recommended Citation
Chicago Style
Number of Pages
121 (126 w/ Works Cited)
Components of Thesis
Single PDF file
Open Access
Available to all.