Nature's ability to satisfy deep human needs is familiar to anyone who has hiked up a mountain, canoed a river, or hung a bird feeder outside the kitchen window. In Story Line, his groundbreaking work of narrative ecocriticism, Ian Marshall explores how natural surroundings inspired works of literature set along the Appalachian Trail. In his new work, Peak Experiences, Marshall sets out on a far more personal and at the same time far-reaching journey, to discover how our modern estrangement from the natural world has affected our mental well-being.

Taking as his starting point the...

Practical Ecocriticismis the first book to ground environmental literature firmly in the life sciences, particularly evolutionary biology, and to attempt to bridge the ever-widening gulf between the -Two Cultures.- Glen Love--himself one of the founders of ecocriticism--argues that literary studies has been diminished by a general lack of recognition for the vital role the biological foundation of human life plays in cultural imagination. Love presents with great clarity and directness an invaluable model for how to incorporate Darwinian ideas--the basis for all modern biology and...

Practical Ecocriticismis the first book to ground environmental literature firmly in the life sciences, particularly evolutionary biology, and to attempt to bridge the ever-widening gulf between the -Two Cultures.- Glen Love--himself one of the founders of ecocriticism--argues that literary studies has been diminished by a general lack of recognition for the vital role the biological foundation of human life plays in cultural imagination. Love presents with great clarity and directness an invaluable model for how to incorporate Darwinian ideas--the basis for all modern biology and...

Lines on the Land

Writers, Art, and the National Parks

Scott Herring

The nineteenth-century photographer William Henry Jackson once complained of the skepticism with which early descriptions of Yellowstone were met: the place was too wondrous to be believed. The public demanded proof, and a host of artists and writers obliged. These early explorers possessed a vigorous devotion to the young nation's wilderness--the naturalist John Muir famously toured the land from Wisconsin to Florida on foot--and through their work established aesthetic categories that exist to...

Best known for The Land of Little Rain, a collection of natural-history essays about the California deserts, the Western writer Mary Austin (1868-1934) was a prolific literary figure in the first few decades of the twentieth century. In addition to her essays and short stories, Austin produced novels, poems, and cultural criticism, and was well known as a feminist, political writer, and mystic. Over the past decade a number of Austin's books have been reissued, and her work has been the subject of increasing critical attention.

Heike Schaefer's study complements that renewed interest...

Although the British romantic poets--notably, Blake, Wordsworth, and Byron--have been the subjects of previous ecocritical examinations, Kate Rigby's Topographies of the Sacred is the first book to compare English and German literary models of romanticism. Rigby treats not only canonical British romantics but an array of major figures in Continental literature, philosophy, and natural history, including Rousseau, Herder, Goethe, Schelling, Schiller, and Alexander von Humboldt. Following the pioneering work of Jonathan Bate and Karl Kroeber, she probes romantic understandings of nature, the...

The paradoxical role nature plays in American myth and history grows in part from the male's reverent fascination with the wilderness and his equally strong impulse to dominate it. Many canonical literary works--think of Thoreau, Melville, Hemingway, Faulkner--look to the wild as the site for establishing a man's selfhood. But nature is just as often subjected to his most violent displays of mastery.

This tension lies at the heart of Eco-Man, which brings together two rapidly growing fields: men's studies and ecocriticism. The two disciplines have rarely if ever touched on...

The paradoxical role nature plays in American myth and history grows in part from the male's reverent fascination with the wilderness and his equally strong impulse to dominate it. Many canonical literary works--think of Thoreau, Melville, Hemingway, Faulkner--look to the wild as the site for establishing a man's selfhood. But nature is just as often subjected to his most violent displays of mastery.

This tension lies at the heart of Eco-Man, which brings together two rapidly growing fields: men's studies and ecocriticism. The two disciplines have rarely if ever touched on...

A first-person meditation on the literary and visual arts of the American West, Westernness: A Meditation explores how this region has developed its own distinct culture, in literature and painting, from the point of view of someone who has been, at different times in his life, both a westerner and an easterner. An engaging and astute reader and observer, Alan Williamson uses his poetic lens to examine the new connections, notably with the Far East, that have been forged in the West, but also the fear, anxiety, and sense of cultural vacancy that western artists have had to overcome...

Lines on the Land

Writers, Art, and the National Parks

Scott Herring

The nineteenth-century photographer William Henry Jackson once complained of the skepticism with which early descriptions of Yellowstone were met: the place was too wondrous to be believed. The public demanded proof, and a host of artists and writers obliged. These early explorers possessed a vigorous devotion to the young nation's wilderness--the naturalist John Muir famously toured the land from Wisconsin to Florida on foot--and through their work established aesthetic categories that exist to...