서부 팽창과 야생의 발견: 자줏빛 산쑥지대의 기사들 에 나타난 19세기 말 미국의 정의관 변화와 생태 의식의 부상

Discovering Wild Nature in the Westward Expansion: The Late-Nineteenth-Century American Views of Justice and Nature in Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage

This study examines how Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage crystalizes the late-nineteenth-century American views of justice and nature in connection with the Westward expansion. Riders does not illuminate the stereotypical confrontation between an outlaw hero and demonized Mormons alone. It displays the emergence of diverse individual emotions under the name of universal human rights, which goes hand in hand with the declining of religious and regional values in late-nineteenth century America. Although the heroic protagonist changes into a debilitated individual under bare subsistence in a desolate wilderness, he still cherishes the hope of rescue, dreaming that some day the winning of the West will conquer the untouched nature as well as every faction in the borderland. Moreover, the awakening moments of natural beauty and its vitality revealed in Riders capture the inchoate ideas of modern ecological thoughts regarding wild nature management, which highlights the American wilderness as a cultivating place of the American character in the postbellum 1800s and thereafter.