Books with steppes, fields, grasslands

Hi everyone. I'm a PhD student in literature starting to assemble my reading list for my dissertation, and I need some help! I’m looking for works of fiction that prominently feature areas of nature that we might describe as “empty” or “blank” – especially steppes, prairies, grasslands, plains, etc., though I’ll also be working with deserts, oceans, and outer space. By “prominently feature,” I mean to say that I’m looking for works that treat these empty spaces in interesting ways and tell us something about our part in and relationship to nature. Here are some examples:

• James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Prairie is named after and appears to be set in a vast, inhospitable prairie, but the prairie the characters navigate turns out to be a conveniently tiny, resource-rich parcel of land perfectly deformed to fit the necessities of the narrative;

• The French film Du soleil pour les gueux takes place entirely atop a grassland plateau but pointedly ignores that fact throughout, the camera treating it without any special interest and repeated character encounters defying its scope and lack of paths;

• Tolstoy’s War and Peace thrusts soldiers into random, meaningless, empty fields and forces them to navigate the reality of those fields.

My study will primarily focus on literature from the 19th and 20th centuries, but I’ll also have chapters on film and video games, the latter of which often treat grasslands as pleasant starting areas. Thank you!