Mary Hunter Austin, a new myth of the desert: idealization, archetype and mysticism in The Land of Little Rain and Lost Borders

Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934) was an American author, known for her nature writing and her defense of Native Americans’ rights in the West. The Land of Little Rain (1903) and Stories from the Country of Lost Borders (1909) are part of her major works on the desert and its people.She is academically recognised for her stance in favor of the Natives, however, this dissertation questions this position and analyses the myth of the desert and its inhabitants she creates, in a literary ecocritical and postcolonial perspective. Indeed, she writes a mystical desert full of flora and fauna, which is a new posture after generations of male colonial writers of the West. Her defense of the natural world is intertwined with portraits of Native Shoshones and Paiutes in California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, fictionalized in the short Stories from the Country of Lost Borders , and presented as real in the non-fiction nature writing work The Land of Little Rain. This dissertation highlights the tension between Mary Hunter Austin’s claim of protection towards Native people and their land, and the myth she draws of archetypal individual figures of Indians, living in an idealized land. The articulation of fiction and non-fiction underlines the dichotomy of her posture.Mary Hunter Austin remains less known than her male counterparts of American nature writing, despite the quality of her writing. She claims a return to the natural world thanks to the Native Americans, still in the context of colonial oppression and industrialization of nature. The mythologization of the desert as a literary trope enables Mary Hunter Austin to give a voice to Native people and to the natural elements. ; Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934) est une autrice américaine, connue pour son oeuvre de nature writing et sa prise de position en faveur des droits des Amérindiens de l’Ouest américian. The Land of Little Rain (1903) et Stories from the Country of Lost Borders (1909) sont ses oeuvres majeures sur le désert et ses habitants.Mary Hunter Austin est reconnue ...