Landscape With Figures

by Ryden, Kent C.; Franklin, Wayne

• ISBN13: 9780877457886
• ISBN10: 0877457883
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of Iowa Pr

Summary

Kent Ryden does not deny that the natural landscape of New England is shaped by many centuries of human manipulation, but he also takes the view that nature is everywhere, close to home as well as in more remote wilderness, in the city and in the countryside. In Landscape with Figures he dissolves the border between culture and nature to merge ideas about nature, experiences in nature, and material alterations of nature.

Ryden takes his readers from the printed page directly to the field and back again. He often bypasses books and goes to the trees from which they are made and the landscapes they evoke, then returns with a renewed appreciation for just what an interdisciplinary, historically informed approach can bring to our understanding of the natural world. By exploring McPhee's The Pine Barrens and Ehrlich's The Solace of Open Spaces, the coastal fiction of New England, surveying and Thoreau's The Maine Woods, Maine's abandoned Cumberland and Oxford Canal, and the natural bases for New England's historical identity, Ryden demonstrates again and again tha

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
Wayne Franklin
Preface	xvii
Big Trees and Back Yards: Time, Landscape, and the Borders of Nature	1	(42)
Landscape with Figures: Land and Tradition in American Nature Writing	43	(24)
Sea Green: Ethics and Environment in New England Coastal Fiction	67	(29)
``A Labyrinth of Errors'': Thoreau, Cartography, and The Maine Woods	96	(39)
A Walk in the Woods: Art and Artifact in a New England Forest	135	(23)
Redesigning the River: Nature, Technology, and the Cumberland and Oxford Canal	158	(41)
Natural Landscapes, Cultural Regions; or, What Is Natural about New England?	199	(84)
Notes	283	(24)
Index	307