Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Thesis (Master's)

Department or Program

Master of Arts in Liberal Studies

First Advisor

David Van Wie

Second Advisor

Donald Pease

Third Advisor

Michael Hartman

Abstract

This thesis examines Lotus-Eating: A Summer Book (1860) by George William Curtis, with illustrations by John Frederick Kensett. Situating the work within the broader culture of the nineteenth-century travel literature, it analyzes the text’s intermedial construction across memoir, poetry, and visual imagery. By considering each of these modes both independently and in relation to one another, the thesis argues that Curtis and Kensett collaboratively produce a hierarchical framework for viewing and experiencing nature.

Drawing on intermedial and ecocritical methodologies, this project demonstrates how the book does not simply depict landscape but actively instructs its audience in how to see it. Curtis’s prose and inclusion of poetry alongside Kensett’s illustrations work in tandem and at some moments in tension to distinguish between the reflective and cultivated observers and the more superficial tourists. In doing so, the text participates in a broader nineteenth-century discourse that linked aesthetic judgment to moral and cultural authority. Ultimately, this thesis contends that Lotus-Eating reveals how tourism, representation, and environmental perceptions are intertwined, exposing the constructed nature of seemingly natural ways of seeing. Through this lens, the work offers insight into the early formation of hierarchical and anthropocentric attitudes toward landscape that continue to shape environmental thought.

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