Download or read book At Home on this Earth written by Lorraine Anderson and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2002 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first chronological presentation of U.S. nature writing by key women authors of the last two centuries.
Download or read book John Steinbeck Nature and Myth written by Peter Lisca and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portrays the life and achievements of a distinguished American writer, winner of a Nobel prize in 1962 and author of "Grapes of Wrath" and "Travels with Charlie."
Download or read book Twentieth century American Nature Poets written by J. Scott Bryson and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American nature poetry is presently adjusting to recent critical movements and attempting to address prevailing fundamental notions concerning humans and their relationships with nature. The authors whose poetry is examined here, whether they approach a large and often frightening American nature as pilgrims or postmodern philosophers, exemplify both this dividedness and the ability to discover the means for healing reconciliation through reconnection with the natural world.
Download or read book Writing the Environment in Nineteenth Century American Literature written by Steven Petersheim and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-09-17 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth-century roots of environmental writing in American literature are often mentioned in passing and sometimes studied piece by piece. Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature brings together numerous explorations of environmentally-aware writing across the genres of nineteenth-century literature. Like Lawrence Buell, the authors of this collection find Thoreau’s writing a touchstone of nineteenth-century environmental writing, particularly focusing on Thoreau’s claim that humans may function as “scribes of nature.” However, these studies of Thoreau’s antecedents, contemporaries, and successors also reveal a range of other writers in the nineteenth century whose literary treatments of nature are often more environmentally attuned than most readers have noticed. The writers whose works are studied in this collection include canonical and forgotten writers, men and women, early nineteenth-century and late nineteenth-century authors, pioneers and conservationists. They drew attention to the conflicted relationships between humans and the American continent, as experienced by Native Americans and European Americans. Taken together, these essays offer a fresh perspective on the roots of environmental literature in nineteenth-century American nonfiction, fiction, and poetry as well as in multi-genre compositions such as the travel writings of Margaret Fuller. Bringing largely forgotten voices such as John Godman alongside canonical voices such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, the authors whose writings are studied in this collection produced a diverse tapestry of nascent American environmental writing in the nineteenth-century. From early nineteenth-century writers such as poet Philip Freneau and novelist Charles Brockden Brown to later nineteenth-century conservationists such as John James Audubon and John Muir, Scribes of Nature shows the development of an environmental consciousness and a growing conservationist ethos in American literature. Given their often surprisingly healthy respect for the natural environment, these nineteenth-century writers offer us much to consider in an age of environmental crisis. The complexities of the supposed nature/culture divide still work into our lives today as economic and environmental issues are often seen at loggerheads when they ought to be seen as part of the same conversation of what it means to live healthy lives, and to pass on a healthy world to those who follow us in a world where human activity is becoming increasingly threatening to the health of our planet.
Download or read book Passions for Nature written by Rochelle Johnson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century Americans celebrated nature through many artistic forms, including natural-history writing, landscape painting, landscape design theory, and transcendental philosophy. Although we tend to associate these movements with the nation’s dawning environmental consciousness, Passions for Nature demonstrates that they instead alienated Americans from the physical environment even as they seemed to draw people to it. Rather than see these expressions of passion for nature as initiating environmental awareness, this study reveals how they contributed to a culture that remains startlingly ignorant of the details of the material world. Using as a touchstone the writings of nineteenth-century philanthropist Susan Fenimore Cooper (the daughter of famed author James Fenimore Cooper), Passions for Nature reveals that while a generalized passion for nature was intense and widespread in her era, cultural attention to the "real" physical world was quite limited. Popular artistic forms represented the natural world through specific metaphors for the American experience, cultivating a national tradition of valuing nature in terms of humanity. Johnson crosses disciplinary boundaries to demonstrate that anthropocentric understandings of the natural world result not only from the growing gulf between science and imagination that C. P. Snow located in the early twentieth century but also--and surprisingly--from cultural productions traditionally viewed as positive engagements with the environment. By uncovering the roots of a cultural alienation from nature, Passions for Nature explains how the United States came to be a nation that simultaneously reveres the natural world and yet remains dangerously distant from it.
Download or read book Findings written by Kathleen Jamie and published by Sort of Books. This book was released on 2011-11-07 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's surprising what you can find by simply stepping out to look. Award-winning poet Kathleen Jamie has an eye and an ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland as well as an incisive sense of our domestic realities. In Findings she draws together these themes to describe travels like no other contemporary writer. Whether she is following the call of a peregrine in the hills above her home in Fife, sailing into a dark winter solstice on the Orkney islands, or pacing around the carcass of a whale on a rain-swept Hebridean beach, she creates a subtle and modern narrative, peculiarly alive to her connections and surroundings.
Download or read book A Companion to American Literature written by Susan Belasco and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-04-03 with total page 1864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive, chronological overview of American literature in three scholarly and authoritative volumes A Companion to American Literature traces the history and development of American literature from its early origins in Native American oral tradition to 21st century digital literature. This comprehensive three-volume set brings together contributions from a diverse international team of accomplished young scholars and established figures in the field. Contributors explore a broad range of topics in historical, cultural, political, geographic, and technological contexts, engaging the work of both well-known and non-canonical writers of every period. Volume One is an inclusive and geographically expansive examination of early American literature, applying a range of cultural and historical approaches and theoretical models to a dramatically expanded canon of texts. Volume Two covers American literature between 1820 and 1914, focusing on the development of print culture and the literary marketplace, the emergence of various literary movements, and the impact of social and historical events on writers and writings of the period. Spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries, Volume Three studies traditional areas of American literature as well as the literature from previously marginalized groups and contemporary writers often overlooked by scholars. This inclusive and comprehensive study of American literature: Examines the influences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and disability on American literature Discusses the role of technology in book production and circulation, the rise of literacy, and changing reading practices and literary forms Explores a wide range of writings in multiple genres, including novels, short stories, dramas, and a variety of poetic forms, as well as autobiographies, essays, lectures, diaries, journals, letters, sermons, histories, and graphic narratives. Provides a thematic index that groups chapters by contexts and illustrates their links across different traditional chronological boundaries A Companion to American Literature is a valuable resource for students coming to the subject for the first time or preparing for field examinations, instructors in American literature courses, and scholars with more specialized interests in specific authors, genres, movements, or periods.
Download or read book John Burroughs and the Place of Nature written by James Perrin Warren and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study situates John Burroughs, together with John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, as one of a trinity of thinkers who, between the Civil War and World War I, defined and secured a place for nature in mainstream American culture. Though not as well known today, Burroughs was the most popular American nature writer of his time. Prolific and consistent, he published scores of essays in influential large-circulation magazines and was often compared to Thoreau. Unlike Thoreau, however, whose reputation grew posthumously, Burroughs wasa celebrity during his lifetime: he wrote more than thirty books, enjoyed a continual high level of visibility, and saw his work taught widely in public schools. James Perrin Warren shows how Burroughs helped guide urban and suburban middle-class readers “back to nature” during a time of intense industrialization and urbanization. Warren discusses Burroughs’s connections not only to Muir and Roosevelt but also to his forebears Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. By tracing the complex philosophical, creative, and temperamental lineage of these six giants, Warren shows how, in their friendships and rivalries, Burroughs, Muir, and Roosevelt made the high literary romanticism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman relevant to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Americans. At the same time, Warren offers insights into the rise of the nature essay as a genre, the role of popular magazines as shapers and conveyors of public values, and the dynamism of place in terms of such opposed concepts as retreat and engagement, nature and culture, and wilderness and civilization. Because Warren draws on Burroughs’s personal, critical, and philosophical writings as well as his better-known narrative essays, readers will come away with a more informed sense of Burroughs as a literary naturalist and a major early practitioner of ecocriticism. John Burroughs and the Place of Nature helps extend the map of America’s cultural landscape during the period 1870-1920 by recovering an unfairly neglected practitioner of one of his era’s most effective forces for change: nature writing.
Download or read book Back from the Far Field written by Bernard W. Quetchenbach and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many poets writing after World War II have found the individual focus of contemporary poetics poorly suited to making statements directed at public issues and public ethics. The desire to invest such individualized poetry with greater cultural authority presented difficulties for Vietnam-protest poets, for example, and it has been a particular challenge for nature writers in the Thoreau tradition who have attempted to serve as advocates for the natural world. Examining the implications of this dilemma, Bernard W. Quetchenbach locates the poets Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, and Wendell Berry within two traditions: the American nature-writing tradition, and the newer tradition of contemporary poetics. He compares the work of two other twentieth-century poets, Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Roethke, to illustrate how the "contemporary shift" toward a poetics focused on the poet's life has affected portrayals of nature and the "public voice" in poetry. Turning back to the work of Bly, Snyder, and Berry, Quetchenbach assesses their attempts to reinvent the public voice in the context of contemporary poetics and what effect these attempts have had on their work. He argues that these poets have learned from their postwar generation techniques for adapting a personalized poetics to environmental advocacy. In addition to modifying what critics have called the "poetics of immediacy," these poets have augmented their poetic output with prose and identified themselves with long-standing traditions of poetic, ethical, and spiritual authority. In doing so, Bly, Snyder, and Berry have attempted to solve not only a problem inherent in contemporary poetics but also the larger problem of the role of the poet in a society that does not recognize poetry. While it would be an overstatement to suggest that these three figures have found a place for the poet in American life, they have reached audiences that extend beyond traditional readers of poetry. At the end of the twentieth century, Quetchenbach concludes, poets have begun to identify, and direct their writing to, specific audiences defined less by aesthetic preferences and more by a shared interest in and dedication to the work's subject matter. Whether revealing a disturbing trend for poetry or an encouraging one for environmentalism and other political causes, it is one of many provocative conclusions Quetchenbach draws from his examination of postwar nature poetry.
Download or read book Beyond Nature Writing written by Karla Armbruster and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Together, their work signals a new direction in the field and offers refreshingly original insights into a broad spectrum of texts.
Download or read book Black Nature written by Camille T. Dungy and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated. Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry--anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild. Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. This collection features major writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson as well as newer talents such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements. Black Nature brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole. A Friends Fund Publication.
Download or read book Twentieth Century American Poetics Poets on the Art of Poetry written by Dana Gioia and published by McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages. This book was released on 2004 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive chronological anthology includes 58 essays on poetry by 53 poets. Starting with James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost, the book offers diverse and often conflicting accounts of the nature and function of poetry. The collection includes rarely anthologized essays by Jack Spicer, Rhina Espaillat, Anne Stevenson, and Ron Silliman, as well as work by some of the finest younger critics in America, including William Logan, Alice Fulton, and Christian Wiman.
Download or read book Nature s Northwest written by William G. Robbins and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of the twentieth century, the greater Northwest was ablaze with change and seemingly obsessed with progress. The promotional literature of the time praising railroads, population increases, and the growing sophistication of urban living, however, ignored the reality of poverty and ethnic and gender discrimination. During the course of the next century, even with dramatic changes in the region, one constant remainedÑ inequality. With an emphasis on the regionÕs political economy, its environmental history, and its cultural and social heritage, this lively and colorful history of the Pacific NorthwestÑdefined here as Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and southern British ColumbiaÑplaces the narrative of this dynamic region within a national and international context. Embracing both Canadian and American stories in looking at the larger region, renowned historian William Robbins and Katrine Barber offer us a fascinating regional history through the lens of both the environment and society. Understanding the physical landscape of the greater Pacific NorthwestÑand the watersheds of the Columbia, Fraser, Snake, and Klamath riversÑsets the stage for understanding the development of the area. Examining how this landscape spawned sawmills, fish canneries, railroads, logging camps, agriculture, and shared immigrant and ethnic traditions reveals an intricate portrait of the twentieth-century Northwest. Impressive in its synthesis of myriad historical facts, this first-rate regional history will be of interest to historians studying the region from a variety of perspectives and an informative read for anyone fascinated by the story of a landscape rich in diversity, natural resources, and Native culture.
Download or read book Crabgrass Crucible written by Christopher C. Sellers and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although suburb-building created major environmental problems, Christopher Sellers demonstrates that the environmental movement originated within suburbs--not just in response to unchecked urban sprawl. Drawn to the countryside as early as the late 19th c
Download or read book Scenes of Nature Signs of Men written by Tony Tanner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-08-25 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the relationship of the American writer to his land and language - to the 'scene' and the 'sign', to the natural landscape and the inscriptions imposed upon it by men. Among the questions considered in the first section of the book are how does American Romantic writing differ from European; what are the peculiar problems faced by the American artist, and what roles does he adopt to tackle them; what kind of writing results when authors as different as Henry Adams and Mark Twain lament the vanishing of an earlier America, or when Adams and Henry James review their complex relationship to their homeland, or when W. D. Howells and Stephen Crane seek to define their themes in a specifically American setting. The second section of the book examines similar concerns in a number of contemporary writers, notably Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, John DeLillo, and William Gass.
Download or read book Poets of Reality written by Joseph Hillis Miller and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1965 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although many books deal individually with each of the major writers treated in Poets of Reality, none attempts through analyses of these particular men and their works, to identify the new directions taken by twentieth-century literature. J. Hillis Miller, challenging the assumption that modern poetry is merely the extension of an earlier romanticism, presents critical studies of the six central figuresâe"Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williamsâe"who played key roles in evolving a poetry in which âeoereality comes to be present to the senses, and present in the words of the poem which ratify this possession.âe A new kind of poetry has appeared in the twentieth century, the author claims, a poetry which, growing out of romanticism and symbolism, goes far beyond it. The old generalizations about the nature and use of poetry are no longer applicable, and it is the gradual emergence of new forms, culminating in the work of Williams, that Miller traces and defines.
Download or read book American Earth Environmental Writing Since Thoreau LOA 182 written by Bill McKibben and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2008-04-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As America and the world grapple with the consequences of global environmental change, writer and activist Bill McKibben offers this unprecedented, provocative, and timely anthology, gathering the best and most significant American environmental writing from the last two centuries. Classics of the environmental imagination, the essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson's Silent Spring - are set against the inspiring story of an emerging activist movement, as revealed by newly uncovered reports of pioneering campaigns for conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches. Here are some of America's greatest and most impassioned writers, taking a turn toward nature and recognizing the fragility of our situation on earth and the urgency of the search for a sustainable way of life. Thought-provoking essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of nature, join ecologists - memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species. The anthology includes a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history, as well as an 80-page color portfolio of illustrations.
