"The wildness that he sought" : En nymaterialistisk läsning av John Williams Butcher's Crossing

Sammanfattning

This thesis offers a new materialist reading of John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing (1960), focusing on how the novel challenges transcendentalist and anthropocentric conceptions of nature. Drawing primarily on Jane Bennett’s theory of vibrant matter, alongside material ecocriticism and William Cronon’s critique of wilderness, the analysis examines how nature in the novel is progressively stripped of symbolic meaning and instead emerges as a material force with its own agency. The study demonstrates how the protagonist’s transcendentalist aspiration to encounter nature as a source of spiritual insight collapses when confronted with the physical realities of drought, cold, animal bodies, and exhaustion. Through close readings of key scenes, such as the buffalo hunt and the winter storm, the thesis shows how nonhuman matter constrains human agency and dissolves the distance necessary for an aestheticized experience of nature. Ultimately, the novel is read as a critique not only of Emersonian transcendentalism, but of the broader cultural tendency to treat nature as a symbolic resource for human self-realization. By foregrounding materiality, proximity, and vulnerability, Butcher’s Crossing presents a non-anthropocentric vision of human-nature relations in which meaning is neither guaranteed nor recoverable.