YAMAMOTO Yohei    Department   Undergraduate School  , School of Science and Technology    Position   Associate Professor
Research Period	2016/04～2020/03
Research Topic	Reconstructing Wilderness Ideology in American Literature
Research Type	KAKENHI Research
Consignor	Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
Research Program Type	Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
KAKENHI Grant No.	16K16791
Responsibility	Representative Researcher
Representative Person	Yamamoto Yohei
Details	I have studied the notion of wilderness which began to receive more attention after Roderick Nash’s_Wilderness and the American Mind_ in 1967, which called attention to a dual aspect of wilderness: “the mental criteria for wilderness are as important as the physical.” Influenced by Nash’s genealogical studies, several critics have discussed wilderness as a socially and historically constructed concept. As the result, not unlike the untamed wilderness American authors such as Thoreau, Melville, Dickinson, Jewett, and Cather so passionately narrates, the thickets and branches of his/her writings, too, must be ventured into and woven through by the reader. In this regard, one of my achievements in this study is to go beyond the oversimplified dichotomies of previous criticism, focusing on the details of their works in relation to the concerns of literary criticism and the environmental humanities.