Abstract

This dissertation contributes to ecocritical scholarship by examining the representation of natural beauty in the environmental imaginations and advocacies of John Muir, Gary Snyder, and Terry Tempest Williams. The emphasis placed on natural beauty in their works suggests beauty’s profound role in activating concern for and creative thinking about the health and future of the planet. Drawing upon the work of Elaine Scarry, this project asserts that beauty engenders a profound defamiliarization and sense of selflessness that contributes to the anti-anthropocentric thrust of ecocriticism. At the same time, in the encounter with beauty, the individual is urged to care for and protect what is perceived as beautiful. Bringing together historic, scientific, and aesthetic perspectives on beauty, this project locates depictions and conceptualizations of beauty in the works of the target authors at a moment when in critical discourses beauty has been marginalized if not ignored. It contends that in the works of Muir, Snyder, and Williams, the experience of beauty converges with notions of interconnection, ecology, and hope in productive ways that expose the vital place that aesthetic appreciation of nature has in environmental advocacy.