Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Subjects & Themes - Nature

In the mode of her bestseller A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman celebrates the sensory pleasures of her garden through the seasons. Whether she is deadheading flowers or glorying in the profusion of roses, offering sugar water to a hummingbird or studying the slug, she welcomes the unexpected drama and extravagance as well as the sanctuary her garden offers.

Written in sensuous, lyrical prose, Cultivating Delight is a hymn to nature and to the pleasure we take in it.

In 1975 Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooded room furnished with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person." For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice death, and the will of God. In Holy the Firm she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls "the hard things -- rock mountain and salt sea," she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a...

Focusing on the work of A.R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, W.S. Merwin, and Gary Snyder, author Leonard Scigaj shows that just as a sustainable society does not depreciate its resource base, so a sustainable poetry does not restrict interest to language. Over the past thirty years many poets have shown an increasing sensitivity to ecological thinking. But critics trained in poststructuralist language theory often fail to explore the substance of ecopoetry. Scigaj is the first to define ecopoetry as separate and distinct from nature or environmental poetry, marked by its concern with balancing the...

Ecocriticism, a field of study that has expanded dramatically over the past decade, has nevertheless remained--until recently--closely focused on critical analyses of nature writing and literature of wilderness. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace push well beyond that established framework with this groundbreaking collection of essays by respected ecocritics and scholars from the literary and environmental arenas. Together, their work signals a new direction in the field and offers refreshingly original insights into a broad spectrum of texts.

Ecocriticism, a field of study that has expanded dramatically over the past decade, has nevertheless remained--until recently--closely focused on critical analyses of nature writing and literature of wilderness. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace push well beyond that established framework with this groundbreaking collection of essays by respected ecocritics and scholars from the literary and environmental arenas. Together, their work signals a new direction in the field and offers refreshingly original insights into a broad spectrum of texts.

The work of John Charles Fremont, Richard Byrd, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, John Wesley Powell, Susan Cooper, Rachel Carson, and Loren Eiseley represents a widely divergent body of writing. Yet despite their range of genres--including exploration narratives, technical reports, natural histories, scientific autobiographies, fictional utopias, nature writing, and popular scientific literature--these seven authors produced strikingly connected representations of nature and the practice of science in America from about 1840 to 1970. Michael A. Bryson provides a thoughtful examination of the...

The work of John Charles Fremont, Richard Byrd, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, John Wesley Powell, Susan Cooper, Rachel Carson, and Loren Eiseley represents a widely divergent body of writing. Yet despite their range of genres--including exploration narratives, technical reports, natural histories, scientific autobiographies, fictional utopias, nature writing, and popular scientific literature--these seven authors produced strikingly connected representations of nature and the practice of science in America from about 1840 to 1970. Michael A. Bryson provides a thoughtful examination of the...

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...

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...

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...

Rooted in a thriving culture of amateur natural history, the keeping of nature journals and diaries flourished in late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century Britain. As prescientific worldviews ceded to a more materialist outlook informed by an explosion of factual knowledge, lovers of nature both famous and obscure began to use daily composition as a quest for information about and a celebration of their surroundings. A central site of encounter, discovery, and expression, nature diaries took part in a vigorous cultural dialogue, performing, in an era called the -golden age- of nature...

Rooted in a thriving culture of amateur natural history, the keeping of nature journals and diaries flourished in late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century Britain. As prescientific worldviews ceded to a more materialist outlook informed by an explosion of factual knowledge, lovers of nature both famous and obscure began to use daily composition as a quest for information about and a celebration of their surroundings. A central site of encounter, discovery, and expression, nature diaries took part in a vigorous cultural dialogue, performing, in an era called the -golden age- of nature...

In western culture, the separation of humans from nature has contributed to a schism between the conscious reason and the unconscious dreaming psyche, or internal human -nature.- Our increasing lack of intimacy with the land has led to a decreased capacity to access parts of the psyche not normally valued in a capitalist culture. In Out of the Shadow: Ecopsychology, Story, and Encounters with the Land, Rinda West uses Jung's idea of the shadow to explore how this divorce results in alienation, projection, and often breakdown. Bringing together ideas from analytical psychology,...

In western culture, the separation of humans from nature has contributed to a schism between the conscious reason and the unconscious dreaming psyche, or internal human -nature.- Our increasing lack of intimacy with the land has led to a decreased capacity to access parts of the psyche not normally valued in a capitalist culture. In Out of the Shadow: Ecopsychology, Story, and Encounters with the Land, Rinda West uses Jung's idea of the shadow to explore how this divorce results in alienation, projection, and often breakdown. Bringing together ideas from analytical psychology,...