Reading under the Sign of Nature : New Essays in Ecocriticism

by Tallmadge, John; Harrington, Henry

• ISBN13: 9780874806489
• ISBN10: 0874806488
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of Utah Pr

Summary

In 1996 the ecocriticism reader appeared, a seminal work defining a then relatively new approach to literary criticism through the lens of environmental and nature studies. Reading Under the Sign of Nature is the first volume to demonstrate the practice of ecocriticism on a wide range of literary texts representing diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural perspectives. Twenty-two essays masterfully exhibit how a variety of ideas -- bioregionalism, feminism, Buddhism, postmodernism, and phenomenology -- can inform that practice.

Included in this volume are critiques of prose and poetry by American writers that have long been in the literary and nature-writing canons, as well as interrogations of work by authors from Native American, African American, Occidental, and Far Eastern traditions. In this long-awaited anthology, a select group of scholars deftly employs the ecocritical approach on a valuable body of contemporary and traditional literature, evincing the rich possibilities for this form of inquiry without, as the editors note, "spinning off into obscurantis

Table of Contents

Introduction	ix
Henry Harrington
John Tallmadge
Landscape: Defining Moral Space
Bringing Nature Writing Home: Josephine Johnson's The Inland Island as Bioregional Narrative	3	(21)
Karla Armbruster
Mapping Island Mindscapes: The Literary and Cultural Uses of a Geographical Formation	24	(12)
Jean Arnold
The Literature of Tourism and Its Discontents: Autotourist Travel Narrative, 1915-1945	36	(15)
Lawrence Culver
Gender: The Body of Nature
Wandering Lonely: Women's Access to the English Romantic Countryside	51	(13)
Stephen Hunt
Placing Rural Hours	64	(21)
Rochelle Johnson
A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Rocky Mountain West: Ambiguity in the Work of Mary Hallock Foote	85	(16)
Benay Blend
Performing ``Wilderness'' in The Last of the Mohicans	101	(16)
David Mazel
Race: Earth's Vision
Paradise Lost: The Destructive Forces of Double Consciousness and Boundaries in Toni Morrison's Paradise	117	(11)
Kristin Hunt
``Dreams of Earth:'' Place, Multiethnicity, and Environmental Justice in Linda Hogan's Solar Storms	128	(20)
Jim Tarter
Frank Waters: Prophet of the Sixth World Consciousness	148	(17)
John Nizalowski
Culture: The Life of the Tribe; the Breath of the Plant
Contexts for Reading ``Song of the Redwood-Tree''	165	(14)
James Perrin Warren
``Coming back to oneself/coming back to the land'': Gary Snyder's Poetics	179	(19)
Nick Selby
``To Make the Visible World Your Conscience'': Adrienne Rich as Revolutionary Nature Writer	198	(10)
Rachel Stein
Charles Olson: Archaeologist of Morning, Ecologist of Evening	208	(23)
Matthew Cooperman
Self: Stalking the Gaps
Climbing Back into the Tree: Art, Nature, and Theology in A River Runs Through It	231	(12)
George F. Grattan
``I Am a Transparent Eyeball'': The Politics of Vision in American Nature Writing	243	(8)
Gretchen Legler
Nature Writing as Refuge: Autobiography in the Natural World	251	(14)
Brooke Libby
``Thinking Like a Mountain'': Death and Deep Ecology in the Work of Peter Matthiessen	265	(18)
McKay Jenkins
Language: Predicates Rising from Pines
The ``Suchness'' of Nature in Tolstoy's Fiction	283	(16)
Roger Anderson
Ando Shoeki, Ecology and Language	299	(16)
Bruce Allen
Postmodernist Nature/Poetry: The Example of Larry Eigner	315	(18)
George Hart
Reveling in the Referential Flux: Involution and Merleau-Ponty's Flesh of the Visible in Pattiann Rogers	333	(18)
Leonard M. Scigaj
Contributors	351	(4)
Acknowledgments	355	(2)
Index	357