num_pages: 176
description: In this ecocritical study of Thomas Wolfe's body of fiction, Robert Taylor Ensign explores how the celebrated writer's storytelling is founded on his dramatization—and apprehension—of the natural world's integral presence in human lives. According to Ensign, Wolfe, as ecoconscious as any American nature writer, conveyed a more emotionally vital natural world than did his contemporaries of the 1920s and 1930s. Ensign traces the engagement of Wolfe’s characters with the nonhuman world to roots in a romantic tradition of American literature, as exemplified by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In Lean Down Your Ear upon the Earth, and Listen, Ensign contends that Wolfe's attitude toward nature has been obscured by the surface dazzle of his nature-drawn imagery. This approach to Wolfe's work, however, shows how nature provides not only structure, coherence, and integrity for Wolfe's narratives but also a source of stability for his characters amid an otherwise fragmented cultural landscape. Although Ensign identifies many modernist fictional elements in Wolfe's narratives, he finds that the romantic depth and emotional intensity of the characters' connection with the natural world challenges the conventional notion that modernist fiction's treatment of the relationship between protagonists and their environments is emotionally flat and detached. Ensign maintains that Wolfe's texts repeatedly suggest that the natural world can arouse the nature within us, evoking emotional responses that can be as uncontrollable as nature itself.
language: English
title: Lean Down Your Ear upon the Earth, and Listen: Thomas Wolfe's Greener Modernism
titlecomplete: Lean Down Your Ear upon the Earth, and Listen: Thomas Wolfe's Greener Modernism
publisher: University of South Carolina Press