UC Riverside

This dissertation, "Representing the Natural World: The Uruguayan Novel at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1888-1916)," studies the importance of the natural world in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Uruguayan novel. This study carries out the first critical analysis of the Uruguayan novel of this period using an ecocritical approach and emphasizes the importance of the natural environment with the purpose of caring for and preserving it. I argue that practices that began to be put into use during the time period that this study analyzes are anti-environmental and lead eventually to the full-fledged environmental crisis that we have been experiencing since the 1970s. This dissertation exposes how certain environmental conflicts arise in the various novelistic worlds studied. Each chapter embraces a different perspective in regard to these environmentally-based conflicts: struggle for independence, urban/rural conflicts, relationship between characters and the natural world, and how the natural world affects characters' psychological development. The pioneering work of Lawrence Buell in his The Environmental Imagination (1995) figures prominently as a theoretical basis for this study, but is complemented both by the environmentally-conscious work of Eduardo Galeano and by the work of various North American ecocritical theorists. This dissertation finds that the Uruguayan novel from the time period indicated is highly pertinent to the theme of the natural environment and that the natural world appears in a number of different forms in the four novels that this study explores. This study contributes to the already great body of ecocritical writing by exploring a specific facet of Latin American literature, the Uruguayan novel, in environmental terms.