Revelations and Resilience

During the twentieth century, American literature witnessed a transformation in representations of apocalypticism and nature. The apocalypse changed from a theological, divine force to a secular, manmade crisis and nature was no longer an active agent as evil menace or nurturing mother but was rendered wholly indifferent. In both modernist representations of apocalypse and nature what became noticeably missing was God and the soul. In works of Southern literature that portray eco-catastrophe, however, God and the soul were never lost. In looking at the ecological tropes of Southern literature during this period, I find that writers access the immaterial world through the particularities of the Southern environment. Whereas the Transcendentalists of nineteenth-century New England considered nature as a medium for transcendence or a place of spectral visitors, the focus remained on our material world—how the immaterial encroaches upon the material. Representations of theological forces within the South at the turn of the twentieth century represented Southern nature as creating a portal into the underworld—Southern grotesque material fading into the immaterial. As part of the larger discourse on environmental apocalypse, this dissertation outlines an ecotheology of the South. Through this ecotheological lens, I analyze eschatological events in Southern literature to steer current ecocritical and Southern Studies discourse away from the spectacle of disaster and toward a narrative of resilience during times of environmental devastation and revelation.