Transformation of the Nineteenth Century American Writers’ Attitudes towards Nature

The aim of this paper is to discover images of nature and its transformation in the nineteenth century American literature through Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature,” Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. The early American settlers considered nature as an object to overcome and exploit for better humanity before the late eighteenth-century, which was the time for American writers and poets to begin expressing their emotions and sentiments in their poetry and novels. Indeed, American literature granted high regards and meanings on nature and the early nineteenth century may be considered as the renaissance period of American literature using nature as one of the main themes. Crane is indifferent, confrontational, and separated from nature rather than comforting humans in the dismal artificial environment of war, slaughter and death committed by humans. He does not overlook this side of nature, but conveys the situation to the reader as if it were the subjects of the photographs taken with the camera. The separation between man and nature that Crane accused not only exists in the American novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also dominates the consciousness of humans living in cities that are inherited in reality.