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Nature as Teacher and Preacher: Examining Natural Religion in the works of the British Romantics, American Transcendentalists, and Global Postmodernists

Cuozzo, Grace Jennifer Louise
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Abstract
The objective of this thesis is to analyze how nature served as an alternative source of knowledge to that of academic or scientific knowledge in three literary time periods: 18th century British Romanticism, 19th century American Transcendentalism, and 20th century Global Postmodernism. Using the poems of William Wordsworth, particularly “Tintern Abbey” and “The Tables Turned”, of William Blake, focusing on “Auguries of Innocence”, and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, including The Divinity School Address, of selected chapters from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and of Walt Whitman’s poem “Eidólons” from the Deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass, and of Italo Calvino’s short story “The Distance of the Moon” in Cosmicomics, I denote how each author gleaned moral, philosophical, psychological, spiritual, emotional, sensual and religious insight in their experiences of nature. In Wordsworth, I identify his invention of pantheism as a worship of nature over an omnipotent God by abandoning Christian scripture in favor of poetry through the reflections of the mind on memory. In Blake, I examine a denunciation of the material world, still in favor of nature, but of one that can only be accessed as a mental cavern in our soul, in which we must see beyond the destructive eye of our corporeal existence into eternity. In Emerson, who will build upon Blake’s ideas, I observe a renovation in his assertion that we must embrace the material world, but at the same time, it is only through our transparent eye (that is, our mental faculty of reason) that we can access truth in nature. In Thoreau and Whitman, I will emphasize an integration of the body into nature that Emerson overlooked. We must sensually engage with nature in order to merge the immanent with the transcendent; the mind with matter; the body with soul. Lastly, I will turn to Calvino as a symbol for the severance between the scientific and poetic imaginative world, which is an essential facet of the human’s relationship with nature
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Thesis (B.A. in English Literature, Minor in Philosophy)--John Cabot University, Spring 2024.
Date
2024
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Keywords
Religion and literature, English literature, Romanticism, American literature, Postmodernism
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Cuozzo, Grace Jennifer Louise. "Nature as Teacher and Preacher: Examining Natural Religion in the works of the British Romantics, American Transcendentalists, and Global Postmodernists". BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2024.
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