Divine Cosmos: Emergent Ecology and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

This dissertation offers a new interpretation of German naturalist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s profound influence on nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Humboldt was a household name in mid-nineteenth-century America, often interchangeable with his most celebrated work, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (1845-1859). By demonstrating that Cosmos influenced how a range of scientists and literary writers represented the natural world, this project seeks to dispel the sense of historical inevitability that surrounds the midcentury with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) looming on the horizon. Although Humboldt’s Cosmos did help move natural science into nonreligious territory, the US reception presents a more complex story than simply the eclipse of natural theology, the conventions of finding God in nature and reconciling new science with theism. This dissertation argues that mid-nineteenth-century writers reimagined Christian natural theologies for the emergent ecological world that Cosmosproposed. Drawing on new studies that emphasize the ways that the religious and secular are mutually constituted, it shows that scientists and literary writers recalibrated natural theologies through Cosmos’s terms and imagery, new historical-literary approaches to the Bible, and epistemic premises from their particular Christian denominations. The first chapter examines Humboldt’s reception in US religious journals and influence on the writings of US scientists. Subsequent chapters analyze how literary writers Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and William Gilmore Simms integrated Cosmos and repurposed natural theologies for an ecological natural world. The Cooper and Thoreau chapters accentuate the theological background of an aesthetics of wonder. The Cosmos moment also gave rise to a new synthesis of Christian providentialism and US imperialism ideology, evident particularly in fictions of nature by Simms and Melville, despite Humboldt’s ardent disavowal of racist ethnologies. A coda proposes that Black writers James McCune Smith and Frederick Douglass employed Humboldtian science in a distinctively Black abolitionist natural theology. This dissertation’s archive of emergent ecological literature will enrich how scholars understand the confluence of nineteenth-century science and religion.