Divine Cosmos: Emergent Ecology and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

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Divine Cosmos: Emergent Ecology and Nineteenth-Century American Literature University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2021 Divine Cosmos: Emergent Ecology and Nineteenth-Century American Literature Lucas R. Nossaman University of Tennessee, Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the History of Religion Commons, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Nossaman, Lucas R., "Divine Cosmos: Emergent Ecology and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2021. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/6672 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Lucas R. Nossaman entitled "Divine Cosmos: Emergent Ecology and Nineteenth-Century American Literature." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Dawn D. Coleman, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Katy L. Chiles, Thomas F. Haddox, Denise Phillips Accepted for the Council: Dixie L. Thompson Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Divine Cosmos: Emergent Ecology and Nineteenth-Century American Literature A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Lucas Nossaman May 2021 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Dawn Coleman, I consider it a tremendous privilege to have worked under you. You have taught me countless lessons about writing that I will remember for years to come. You responded to my recalcitrant prose and stray theological musings with professional grace. Thank you for believing in this project and for committing so much time to improving it. Katy Chiles, thank you for allowing me to work with you and learn the fields of African American and Native American literature. You forced me to think carefully about different audiences, and for that I am very grateful, and your commitment to archival research has inspired me to keep searching for new discoveries. Thomas Haddox, your Catholicism was a faithful presence as I thought about religion in this project. I knew I could depend on you to ask the why and so what questions, and remembering that someone was looking at the big picture was a great relief to me. Denise Phillips, you went above and beyond as an outside reader. You showed me where to wade into the massive scholarship on religion and science. Most importantly, you knew Humboldt—in German! (What a novelty! Ha.) I feel very blessed to have had you on the committee. I thank UTK’s interlibrary loan and microfilm staffs for helping me locate materials. A University of Tennessee Humanities Center graduate student fellowship made it possible for me to have all of my sources in one location and have a quiet haven in which to complete the work. I thank Joan Murray for answering all my questions and for keeping the Center comfortable and safe in the time of COVID-19. I thank the Riggsby family for their generous financial support of the UTHC that allowed me to purchase research books. A Thoreau Society graduate student fellowship provided funds to visit Boston-area archives, but unfortunately COVID-19 made travel impossible before I finished. However, the award did put me in contact with several relevant Thoreau scholars, and so I here acknowledge the Society’s generous help and support. iii Several scholars at different institutions have contributed to this project by suggesting and providing sources. I thank Matthew Simmons at the University of South Carolina Center for Digital Humanities for guiding me to essential Simms sources and materials on Charleston. I thank Rochelle Johnson for sharing her expertise on Cooper and generously sending transcriptions of unpublished Cooper manuscripts. I thank Derrick Spires for directing me to James McCune Smith and insisting that Black writers knew Humboldt. For their encouragement and for listening to me air grievances, I thank Nelson Shake and Jeff Bilbro. Several churches and spiritual mentors have enriched my family’s time in Knoxville as well as my intellectual development at UTK. My family thanks the Laurel Church of Christ and the families there who loved us, welcomed us into your homes, grieved with us, and befriended our children. We also thank Graystone Presbyterian Church and Dr. Leslie Rust for theological stability and the respite of worship we needed during COVID-19. I thank Julian and Melanie Reese at InterVarsity graduate student ministry for coffee and conversation about theological books and the unique challenges of academia. This project could not have been completed without the unwavering support and love of my parents and in-laws. I thank my parents for instilling a love of the church, books, and natural places. I thank my in-laws for keeping the Brevard homeplace, where our children could roam and I could walk the dog and watch the turkeys roost for the night. My most important thanks go to my wife, Heather, and our two children, one of whom was born in the middle of the writing. At the start of this project, we lost our precious Glory, but we have been blessed and, along with her, are being renewed “from one degree of glory to another.” Heather, thank you for your many sacrifices and for reminding me of what is most important. This work is dedicated to you in love. Beatrice, tout mon cœur. Ezra, this is for you: THE END. iv ABSTRACT This dissertation offers a new interpretation of German naturalist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s profound influence on nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Humboldt was a household name in mid-nineteenth-century America, often interchangeable with his most celebrated work, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (1845-1859). By demonstrating that Cosmos influenced how a range of scientists and literary writers represented the natural world, this project seeks to dispel the sense of historical inevitability that surrounds the midcentury with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) looming on the horizon. Although Humboldt’s Cosmos did help move natural science into nonreligious territory, the US reception presents a more complex story than simply the eclipse of natural theology, the conventions of finding God in nature and reconciling new science with theism. This dissertation argues that mid-nineteenth-century writers reimagined Christian natural theologies for the emergent ecological world that Cosmos proposed. Drawing on new studies that emphasize the ways that the religious and secular are mutually constituted, it shows that scientists and literary writers recalibrated natural theologies through Cosmos’s terms and imagery, new historical- literary approaches to the Bible, and epistemic premises from their particular Christian denominations. The first chapter examines Humboldt’s reception in US religious journals and influence on the writings of US scientists. Subsequent chapters analyze how literary writers Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and William Gilmore Simms integrated Cosmos and repurposed natural theologies for an ecological natural world. The Cooper and Thoreau chapters accentuate the theological background of an aesthetics of wonder. The Cosmos moment also gave rise to a new synthesis of Christian providentialism and US imperialism ideology, evident particularly in fictions of nature by Simms and Melville, despite v Humboldt’s ardent disavowal of racist ethnologies. A coda proposes that Black writers James McCune Smith and Frederick Douglass employed Humboldtian science in a distinctively Black abolitionist natural theology. This dissertation’s archive of emergent ecological literature will enrich how scholars understand the confluence of nineteenth-century science and religion. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Assembling a Wondrous Earth.........................................................................25 Chapter 2: Writing Sacred Natural History: Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours .......66 Chapter 3: These Objects Make a World: Henry David Thoreau’s Liberal Protestant Nature Writings ................................................................................................................105 Chapter 4: Possessive Providential Ecology: William Gilmore Simms’s The Cassique of Kiawah .........................................................................................................................154 Coda: The Black Abolitionist Natural Theology of James McCune Smith and Frederick Douglass ..........................................................................................................200 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................205 Vita ...................................................................................................................................230
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