The gothic pastoral: Hidden and haunted landscapes in American nature poetry.

摘要

The Gothic Pastoral: Hidden and Haunted Landscapes in American Nature Poetry utilizes an ecocritical approach to uncover pastoral haunted nature, produced through gothic American history. In my thesis, I consider the environment's power to convey history, to challenge our aesthetic suppositions, and, through the soil, to teach us about the role of the environment in poetry and our everyday lives. The first chapter, "'The Snare Which Lurks Beneath the Smiling Scene': A Case for the Gothic Pastoral," examines how African American nature poets, while tending to the classical notion of the pastoral, carved out new territory in the genre through the creation of a gothic, history- and violence-ridden pastoral. The second chapter, entitled "'The Garden Stiffens and the Odors Bleed': Graves & Gardens, Corpses & Worms in Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath," considers the gothic pastoral as a fit vessel for carrying the affects of disgust and delight from the page to the reader. "A Poem Like Dirt, or, Bodies of the Soil," concludes my thesis with an essay composed of lyrical fragments on the nature of dirt in and around poetry.