Literature and Nature
University of Helsinki/
Comparative
Literature
28.10.2014
M.A. Pekka Raittinen
Wilderness and Forests
Henry David Thoreau
Walking 1862
“...in Wildness is the
preservation of the world”
“The founding fathers of modern
environmentalism, Henry David
Thoreau and John Muir, promised
that ‘in wildness is the
preservation of the world’. The
presumption was that the
wilderness was out there,
somewhere in the western heart of
America, awaiting discovery...”
Simon Schama Landscape and
Memory, 1995
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Greg Garrard: A literary trope, antithetical to
civilization
The opposition of wilderness and civilization
in literature is often seen as beginning with
the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh
Judeo-Christian tradition: Exile from the
Garden of Eden; Exile from Egypt and forty
years in the desert; Temptation of the Christ
etc.
Etymology: wil-deor-ness; “the place of wild
animals”
Narratives and definitions
The Puritans; William
Bradford (1590 –
1657); ”Howling
Wilderness”
 Thoreau and Muir:
Wilderness as a
cornerstone of
national identity
 William Faulker: ”The
Bear” (1942): Male
identity and
ambiguity

American Wilderness
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Roderick Nash Wilderness and the American
Mind (1967) => The American (U.S) ”Grand
Narrative” of the conquest and/or
preservation of the wilderness
William Cronon “The Trouble With
Wilderness” (1996)
http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble
_with_Wilderness_Main.html
Does wilderness contain humans?
Preservation versus wise use of resources?
Wilderness – a socially constructed concept
and category?
American context & problems
Timo Myllyntaus ja
Mikko Saikku 2001 =>
American wilderness
and Finnish ”erämaa”
different concepts
 But!; ”erämaa” also
used in the construction
of national identity=>
literature, art, classical
music
 Literally ”erämaa”
means ”a hunting
ground”

A Finnish Wilderness – ”erämaa”?
The Forest(s) of Literature
- Merkitysten tiheikkö?
(
Lähteenä Robert Pogue Harrison: Forests
– The Shadow of Civilization, 1992
Deforestation=> Wood
for the fleets of the
Greek polis, erosion
from Roman agriculture
 Artemis; the Hellenic
goddess of hunt, wild
animals and wildernes
(Roman Diana)
 Tacitus (Ad 55 - 120):
Germania; ”A Most
Dangerous Book”
 Euripides: The Bacchae

The Antiquity
 Midway
upon the journey of our
life
I found myself within a forest
dark,
For the straightforward pathway
had been lost.
Dante: The Divine Comedy,
Inferno(Hell)
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The English word
forest from Latin root
foresta; meaning the
Kings hunting
grounds
Latin foris; ”outside
the law” =Robin Hood
and his men
Deforestation in
Renaissance Italy;
Dante’s selva obscura
The Middle Ages and the
Renaissance
France: Encyclopédie
and forestry; Le Roy
=> forests property
of the state
 Germany: The
Brothers Grimm =>
”fatherland” and
nostalgia for ”old
German forests”
 ”Against nature”; the
symbolistic forest of
correspondences

Enlightenment, Romanticism,
Modernity etc…
Frank Lloyd Wright:
Falling Water, 1936 - 39