Overview
James Krasner demonstrates how Charles Darwin's representational techniques transformed his opulently "entangled" nature into a formless, psychologically interior landscape. The abundance and variety of evolutionary nature required Darwin and the nature writers who followed him to portray nature as though seen through a physical eye. Using the visual perception theories of Berkeley, Hamilton, Brewster, Koffka, and James, Krasner investigates the ways in which Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and D.H. Lawrence, as well as other naturalists and nature writers, came to portray nature as the locus of optical illusion and visual failure. Narrative portrayals of nature become narrative portrayals of the perception of nature in which the physiological limitations of the human eye determine the structure of the representation.