Coyote in the Maze

by Quigley, Peter; Stiles, Jim; Cassidy, Stewart

• ISBN13: 9780874805635
• ISBN10: 0874805635
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-06-09
• Publisher: Univ of Utah Pr

Summary

The Works of Edward Abbey have been well known to general readers since the 1960s. Now an increasing interest in nature and environmental writing has focused the attention of a new generation of readers on classics such as Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang. This volume, the first comprehensive collection of literary criticism devoted to the entire challenging corpus of Abbey's fiction and nonfiction, couldn't be more timely or significant. From the perspective of his scholarly critics in Western American literature and environmental studies Ed Abbey is, in a word, a problem. As Peter Quigley, the volume editor comments, "The title of this collection refers to a number of references within Abbey's work. The maze is a place of myriad canyons, of wonder, and a place where the desperadoes in The Monkey Wrench Gang could lose the authorities. The coyote refers to the slippery figure in Native American myth, a figure, known to Abbey, that always eluded definition and could slip out of every trap set to catch him". In this long-awaited anthology, eighteen intrepid scholars have chosen to ignore the coyote's reputation, tracking Abbey in one masterful and illuminating essay after another through the canyons of anarchist politics, philosophy, feminist literary criticism, post-structuralism, and rhetoric, as well as nature and environmental theory and activism.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Heraclitean Fire, Bakhtinian Laughter, and the Limits of Literary Judgment	1	(18)
Peter Quigley
Foreword I: The Roots of Abbey's Social Critique	19	(14)
Edward S. Twining
Foreword II: Magpie	33	(14)
SueEllen Campbell
"I'm a humanist": The Poetic Past in Desert Solitaire	47	(27)
David J. Rothman
Who Is the Lone Ranger?: Edward Abbey as Philosopher	74	(14)
David Rothenberg
Nativity, Domesticity, and Exile in Edward Abbey's "One True Home"	88	(18)
Tom Lynch
Rage against the Machine: Edward Abbey and Neo-Luddite Thought	106	(13)
Paul Lindholdt
Edward Abbey's Inadvertent Postmodernism: Theory, Autobiography, and Politics	119	(18)
William Chaloupka
Abbey as Anarchist	137	(13)
Harold Alderman
"Getting the Desert into a Book": Nature Writing and the Problem of Representation in a Postmodern World	150	(18)
Claire Lawrence
Surviving Doom and Gloom: Edward Abbey's Desert Comedies	168	(16)
Rebecca Raglon
Nietzschean Themes in the Works of Edward Abbey	184	(22)
Steve Norwick
Edward Abbey's Cow	206	(20)
Barbara Barney Nelson
Edward Abbey and Gender	226	(16)
Paul T. Bryant
The Life of the Author: Emerson, Foucault, and the Reading of Edward Abbey's Journals	242	(21)
David Copland Morris
From the Banks of the Illisus to the Arches of Utah: Edward Abbey as Noble Rhetorician	263	(14)
Bryan L. Moore
Biocentrism and Green Existentialism: Edward Abbey's Conflicting Conceptualizations of Nature	277	(19)
Werner Bigell
The Politics and Aesthetics of a Hopeful Anarchism: Edward Abbey's Postmodern "Angelic Demonology"	296	(20)
Peter Quigley
The Politics of Leisure: "Industrial Tourism" in Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire	316	(19)
James A. Papa, Jr.
List of Contributors	335	(4)
Index	339	(4)
Acknowledgments	343