Degree Name
MA (Master of Arts)
Program
English
Date of Award
5-2018
Committee Chair or Co-Chairs
Thomas Alan Holmes
Committee Members
Rebecca Fletcher, Joshua Reid
Abstract
Ron Rash’s Serena and Ann Pancake’s Strange as This Weather Has Been are two contemporary Appalachian novels that have yet to be analyzed from a biblical ecocritical perspective. While some literary scholars acknowledge the environmental aspects of the novels, little of their research goes beyond examining the land and its resources as commodities or metaphorical extensions for the characters. In this thesis, I elaborate on those interpretations by scrutinizing the natural descriptions in both novels and comparing those findings to some of the landscapes and environmental verses located within the Bible. Unlike the pastoral ideal found in a portion of the literature preceding the twentieth century, contemporary Appalachian writers such as Rash and Pancake have moved away from such a bucolic, prelapsarian idealization in favor of limning a more industrialized, postlapsarian Appalachia. Following both analyses, I conclude by predicting how emerging Appalachian writers will portray the landscape in future works.
Document Type
Thesis - unrestricted
Recommended Citation
Craft, Alexandria C., "Environmental Deterioration in Contemporary Appalachian Literature: A Biblical Ecocritical Analysis of Serena and Strange as This Weather Has Been" (2018). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 3415. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3415
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.