Abstract

This study of 19th- and 20th-century American Literature analyzes narrative and psychological affiliation to answer the question: What are the ramifications of a view of landscape and what part does the act of storytelling play in shaping these approaches? ;While standard literary-critical emphases on the pastoral and myth symbolism add to our understanding, the focus has almost always remained on epistemological skepticism or trope formation. Thus attention has been directed inward, as though the human psyche alone constructs its idea of the world. This work argues that we should focus on more than the strictly theoretical debate about how the mind constructs knowledge. ;From a base in phenomenological philosophy and geography, this study traces our idea of how identity is formed in place. The dissertation turns to Henry Thoreau and his Journal and late essays as a foundational literature of American inhabitation. Thoreau's late works help to develop a vocabulary with which we can read other works of the American literature of inhabitation, such as captivity narratives and nature writing, where we discover the American sense of home as more than the built environment. For these writers, the physical groundedness of the world creates senses of history, community, and affiliation. The study also points to some of the problems of an archaeological sense of the life-world and history residing in place, and questions the realization concerning earlier, Native American inhabitants. ;The final section addresses the storying of place and how imaginative works of fiction from a crucial period in American history create a world. Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, Vardis Fisher, and John Steinbeck have focused on psychological and physical inhabitation, and raised important questions about how narrative and communally-held stories shape and address identity in relation to the land