Date of Award

Winter 1-21-2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

First Advisor

Pamela Caughie

Abstract

Vital Environs: Ecologies of Modernism and the Nature Tradition is an investigation of late nineteenth and early twentieth century British literature that explores the space between the individual and the external world. The project begins by exploring the “mind-body problem,” which is a topic in philosophy that recognizes the difficulty in understanding how the mind emerges from physical matter. While this topic has been in discussion since at least Descartes, science is still making crucial discoveries that challenge our understanding of this connection. I argue that the environmental crisis we find ourselves in today is a mind-body problem of global proportions, as our understanding of the physical world is intertwined with the perceptions we have of ourselves as individuals and as a species. The texts discussed in this dissertation enter this space and invite us to ask questions about our own place within the world. I begin with authors in the Nature Tradition, a theme in literature defined by Roger Ebbatson in 1980 that includes authors like Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence. Such authors understood humanity as contained within Nature, and they therefore saw Nature as an important source of knowledge for human improvement. From there, I move into the city, looking at Strange Meetings by Harold Monro and several short stories by Virginia Woolf. I argue that while Modernism has a complicated relationship with climate change, these Modernist authors show a renewed interest in conscious experience in the world and help us rethink our traditional sense of subject and object. Lastly, I explore literature set on the seaside, with Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Waves, which give greater insight into how literary environment can be more than a literary setting, as it is often interlaced with our sense of time, memory, and selfhood. This dissertation is a literary and cultural investigation taking from theorists like Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, who have recently opened greater dialogue about the role of art in understanding the environmental crisis. I argue that literature is an excellent space to explore the negotiation between the self and external world, and that it allows for conversations that fall outside the purview of the physical sciences. Living in a profoundly dynamic moment in British history, the authors included in this dissertation grapple with their place in a changing world—a feeling that has certainly only heightened in the twenty-first century. I argue that ultimately, we may feel more emotionally capable of responding to the environmental crisis if we encountered it through writing, imagination, experience, perspective, and art.

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