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Abstract
Peter Matthiessen is widely regarded as a serious, disciplined author who wrote about wild nature, vanishing cultures, and human society. He was a dedicated naturalist from early on, and the concern for nature informed his work from the beginning of his career. This paper analyses Matthiessen’s major works from the perspective of ecocriticism, revealing his ecological ideas on natural ecology, social ecology and spiritual ecology respectively. For Matthiessen, the modern environmental crisis is inseparable from social and spiritual problems. He criticizes the anthropocentric and imperial points of view, sparing no effort to pursue justice, harmony and wholeness both in his literary imagination and real life.
Highlights
Peter Matthiessen is widely regarded as a serious, disciplined author who wrote about wild nature, vanishing cultures, and human society
This paper takes ecocriticism as its theoretical framework, setting Matthiessen in the context of the global ecological crisis. It tries to make a systematic and comprehensive analysis of Matthiessen’s ecological ideas from the perspective of natural ecology, social ecology and spiritual ecology, in the hope that this would contribute to the study of Matthiessen and his works
Social ecology is closely related to the work of Murray Bookchin, and he argues that violence against the natural world has its origin in human social and economic institutions based on oppressive systems of hierarchy and elitism
Summary
Peter Matthiessen is widely regarded as a serious, disciplined author who wrote about wild nature, vanishing cultures, and human society He wrote more than 25 books, including At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Far Tortuga, Shadow Country and In Paradise. As a preeminent American novelist and non-fiction writer, he received critical acclaim and his country’s most prestigious literary accolades, including an unprecedented three National Book Awards—the first in 1979 for The Snow Leopard (Contemporary Thought), a second (General Non-fiction) for the same work in 1980, and a third award in 2008 for Shadow Country (Fiction). “Sons and daughters of Thoreau abound in contemporary American writing, if we can believe the reviewers”, wrote Edward Abbey, one of the literary progeny, himself One of those he had in mind was Peter Matthiessen, whom he dubbed “the Thoreau of Africa, South America, the Himalaya, and the wide, wild sea”. My hope is that such an inquiry could extend the critical understanding of his work through a focused, deep exploration from an ecocritical perspective
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