Combining intellectual history with literary analysis, this study of Whitman's language experiment from 1855 to 1892 offers a refreshing new look at his theory of language especially the English language in America—as an expression of a "national spirit" and relates that theory to the language and style of Whitman's major poems and essays. Whitman viewed American English as the most expressive, poetic language that ever existed, and he used his studies of historical linguistics to corroborate that view. Part 1 explicates the theory of language that Whitman developed in his linguistic notebooks, unpublished manuscripts, fugitive essays, and two chapters of the popular book Rambles Among Words. The diction and syntax of the 1855–1856 editions of Leaves of Grass are analyzed to show how Whitman's overwhelming interest in language theories resulted in the "language experiment" of the poems. Part 2 examines the ways in which Whitman's view of language as an expression of the constantly evolving spirit of America subtly shifted to a more cumulative, backward-looking vision of linguistic and spiritual change. Analysis of the diction, syntax, and organization of the last four editions of Leaves of Grass reveals how this shift in vision affected the style of Whitman's poetry and prose from 1860 to 1892. Whitman's groundbreaking poetic style, the author concludes, was a direct consequence of his view of language and the human spirit as dynamic, progressivist, and actively changing within a temporal world. Conversely, Whitman's experiments in both prose and poetry helped confirm his view of linguistic and spiritual evolution.
John Haines arrived in Alaska, fresh out of the Navy, in 1947, and established a homestead seventy miles southeast of Fairbanks. He stayed there nearly twenty-five years, learning to live off the country: hunting, trapping, fishing, gathering berries, and growing vegetables. Those years formed him as a writer—the interior of Alaska, and especially its boreal forest—marking his poetry and prose and helping him find his unique voice. Placing John Haines, the first book-length study of his work, tells the story of those years, but also of his later, itinerant life, as his success as a writer led him to hold fellowships and teach at universities across the country. James Perrin Warren draws out the contradictions inherent in that biography—that this poet so indelibly associated with place, and authentic belonging, spent decades in motion—and also sets Haines’s work in the context of contemporaries like Robert Bly, Donald Hall, and his close friend Wendell Berry. The resulting portrait shows us a poet who was regularly reinventing himself, and thereby generating creative tension that fueled his unforgettable work. A major study of a sadly neglected master, Placing John Haines puts his achievement in compelling context.
Thoreau’s last years have been the subject of debate for decades, but only recently have scholars and critics begun to appreciate the posthumous publications, unfinished manuscripts, and Journal entries that occupied the writer after Walden (1854). Until now, no critical reader has delved deeply enough into botany to see how Thoreau’s plant studies impact his thinking and writing. Thoreau’s Botany moves beyond general literary appreciation for the botanical works to apply Thoreau’s extensive studies of botany—from 1850 to his death in 1862—to readings of his published and unpublished works in fresh, interdisciplinary ways. Bringing together critical plant studies, ecocriticism, and environmental humanities, James Perrin Warren argues that Thoreau’s botanical excursions establish a meeting ground of science and the humanities that is only now ready to be recognized by readers of American literature and environmental literature.
This study situates John Burroughs, together with John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, as one of a trinity of thinkers who, between the Civil War and World War I, defined and secured a place for nature in mainstream American culture. Though not as well known today, Burroughs was the most popular American nature writer of his time. Prolific and consistent, he published scores of essays in influential large-circulation magazines and was often compared to Thoreau. Unlike Thoreau, however, whose reputation grew posthumously, Burroughs wasa celebrity during his lifetime: he wrote more than thirty books, enjoyed a continual high level of visibility, and saw his work taught widely in public schools. James Perrin Warren shows how Burroughs helped guide urban and suburban middle-class readers “back to nature” during a time of intense industrialization and urbanization. Warren discusses Burroughs’s connections not only to Muir and Roosevelt but also to his forebears Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. By tracing the complex philosophical, creative, and temperamental lineage of these six giants, Warren shows how, in their friendships and rivalries, Burroughs, Muir, and Roosevelt made the high literary romanticism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman relevant to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Americans. At the same time, Warren offers insights into the rise of the nature essay as a genre, the role of popular magazines as shapers and conveyors of public values, and the dynamism of place in terms of such opposed concepts as retreat and engagement, nature and culture, and wilderness and civilization. Because Warren draws on Burroughs’s personal, critical, and philosophical writings as well as his better-known narrative essays, readers will come away with a more informed sense of Burroughs as a literary naturalist and a major early practitioner of ecocriticism. John Burroughs and the Place of Nature helps extend the map of America’s cultural landscape during the period 1870-1920 by recovering an unfairly neglected practitioner of one of his era’s most effective forces for change: nature writing.
The award-winning American environmental writer Barry Lopez has traveled extensively in remote and populated parts of the world. Lopez’s fiction and nonfiction focus on the relationship between the physical landscape and human culture, posing abiding questions about ethics, intimacy, and place. Other Country presents a full-scale treatment of Lopez’s work. James Perrin Warren examines the relationship between Lopez’s writing and the work of several contemporary artists, composers, and musicians, whose works range from landscape photography, painting, and graphic arts to earth art, ceramics, and avant-garde music. The author demonstrates Lopez’s role in creating this community of artists who have led cultural change, and shows that Lopez’s writing—and his engagement with the natural world—creates an “other country” by redefining boundaries, rediscovering a place, and renewing our perceptions of landscapes. Warren’s critique examines manuscripts and typescripts from the 1960s to the present, interviews with Lopez conducted from 2008 to 2013, and interviews with artists. Part 1 focuses on the relationship between Lopez’s storytelling, which he calls “a conversation with the land,” and Robert Adams’s landscape photography. For both Lopez and Adams, a worthy artistic expression serves the cultural memory of a community, reminding us how to behave properly toward other people and the land. Part 2 looks at the collaborative friendship of Lopez and visual artist Alan Magee, tracking the development of Lopez’s short stories through a consideration of Magee’s career. Part 3 moves farther afield, discussing Lopez’s relationship to Richard Long’s earth art, Richard Rowland’s ceramics, and John Luther Adams’s soundscapes. Other Country reveals the dynamic relationships between Lopez, considered by many the most important environmental writer working in America, and the artistic community, who seek to explore the spiritual and ethical dimensions of an honorable and attentive relationship to the land and thus offer profound implications for the future of the planet.
These six stories offer insight into the relationships between humans and animals, creativity and beauty, and life and death. Barry Moser's eleven layered engravings provide a meditative experience that parallels Lopez's complex sense of our relationship to nature"--Provided by publisher"--
The award-winning American environmental writer Barry Lopez has traveled extensively in remote and populated parts of the world. Lopez’s fiction and nonfiction focus on the relationship between the physical landscape and human culture, posing abiding questions about ethics, intimacy, and place. Other Country presents a full-scale treatment of Lopez’s work. James Perrin Warren examines the relationship between Lopez’s writing and the work of several contemporary artists, composers, and musicians, whose works range from landscape photography, painting, and graphic arts to earth art, ceramics, and avant-garde music. The author demonstrates Lopez’s role in creating this community of artists who have led cultural change, and shows that Lopez’s writing—and his engagement with the natural world—creates an “other country” by redefining boundaries, rediscovering a place, and renewing our perceptions of landscapes. Warren’s critique examines manuscripts and typescripts from the 1960s to the present, interviews with Lopez conducted from 2008 to 2013, and interviews with artists. Part 1 focuses on the relationship between Lopez’s storytelling, which he calls “a conversation with the land,” and Robert Adams’s landscape photography. For both Lopez and Adams, a worthy artistic expression serves the cultural memory of a community, reminding us how to behave properly toward other people and the land. Part 2 looks at the collaborative friendship of Lopez and visual artist Alan Magee, tracking the development of Lopez’s short stories through a consideration of Magee’s career. Part 3 moves farther afield, discussing Lopez’s relationship to Richard Long’s earth art, Richard Rowland’s ceramics, and John Luther Adams’s soundscapes. Other Country reveals the dynamic relationships between Lopez, considered by many the most important environmental writer working in America, and the artistic community, who seek to explore the spiritual and ethical dimensions of an honorable and attentive relationship to the land and thus offer profound implications for the future of the planet.
Combining intellectual history with literary analysis, this study of Whitman's language experiment from 1855 to 1892 offers a refreshing new look at his theory of language especially the English language in America—as an expression of a "national spirit" and relates that theory to the language and style of Whitman's major poems and essays. Whitman viewed American English as the most expressive, poetic language that ever existed, and he used his studies of historical linguistics to corroborate that view. Part 1 explicates the theory of language that Whitman developed in his linguistic notebooks, unpublished manuscripts, fugitive essays, and two chapters of the popular book Rambles Among Words. The diction and syntax of the 1855–1856 editions of Leaves of Grass are analyzed to show how Whitman's overwhelming interest in language theories resulted in the "language experiment" of the poems. Part 2 examines the ways in which Whitman's view of language as an expression of the constantly evolving spirit of America subtly shifted to a more cumulative, backward-looking vision of linguistic and spiritual change. Analysis of the diction, syntax, and organization of the last four editions of Leaves of Grass reveals how this shift in vision affected the style of Whitman's poetry and prose from 1860 to 1892. Whitman's groundbreaking poetic style, the author concludes, was a direct consequence of his view of language and the human spirit as dynamic, progressivist, and actively changing within a temporal world. Conversely, Whitman's experiments in both prose and poetry helped confirm his view of linguistic and spiritual evolution.
John Haines arrived in Alaska, fresh out of the Navy, in 1947, and established a homestead seventy miles southeast of Fairbanks. He stayed there nearly twenty-five years, learning to live off the country: hunting, trapping, fishing, gathering berries, and growing vegetables. Those years formed him as a writer—the interior of Alaska, and especially its boreal forest—marking his poetry and prose and helping him find his unique voice. Placing John Haines, the first book-length study of his work, tells the story of those years, but also of his later, itinerant life, as his success as a writer led him to hold fellowships and teach at universities across the country. James Perrin Warren draws out the contradictions inherent in that biography—that this poet so indelibly associated with place, and authentic belonging, spent decades in motion—and also sets Haines’s work in the context of contemporaries like Robert Bly, Donald Hall, and his close friend Wendell Berry. The resulting portrait shows us a poet who was regularly reinventing himself, and thereby generating creative tension that fueled his unforgettable work. A major study of a sadly neglected master, Placing John Haines puts his achievement in compelling context.
During the past century, literary education, often divorced from rhetoric, has grown increasingly distant from the practice of language in statecraft, law, religion, and ethics. Yet literature and rhetoric retain open, independent powers to enhance what Emerson calls &"the conduct of life.&" In these provocative essays, James Engell argues that a more complete literary training can foster a heightened sense of shared social experience, an awareness of diverse views, a love of language, and a more powerful ability to express the values we enshrine or debate. Revealing a set of deep intersections among literature, politics, rhetoric, and the public deliberation of values, he explores how dedicated individuals of different callings resort to heightened language in order to secure knowledge, test beliefs, consider policy, and promote action. Through profiles of Lincoln, Burke, Swift, Hume, Lowth, Vico, and others, Engell explores the political and ethical involvement of writers with their culture in order to reestablish links between literary qualities of language and the means by which we challenge power and secure liberty. He presents a cogent argument for a different, expanded kind of literary education, suggesting that training in rhetoric, now often misunderstood or neglected, can serve the common good without becoming mired in partisan squabbles or academic pedantry. Despite the dominance of visual media in our society, observes Engell, the difficult problems we face must be resolved through language. By presenting writers who use resourceful language to engage political contests and cultural issues, he contributes to ongoing debates in education, politics, and culture without subscribing to easy labels of &"left&" and &"right&" or &"traditional&" versus &"innovative.&" He demonstrates imaginative ways to apply time-tested literary techniques to a changing world, making use of the past yet in a way that the past could not predict. This passionately argued book calls for a shift in the ways we teach and regard literature.
This study situates John Burroughs, together with John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, as one of a trinity of thinkers who, between the Civil War and World War I, defined and secured a place for nature in mainstream American culture. Though not as well known today, Burroughs was the most popular American nature writer of his time. Prolific and consistent, he published scores of essays in influential large-circulation magazines and was often compared to Thoreau. Unlike Thoreau, however, whose reputation grew posthumously, Burroughs wasa celebrity during his lifetime: he wrote more than thirty books, enjoyed a continual high level of visibility, and saw his work taught widely in public schools. James Perrin Warren shows how Burroughs helped guide urban and suburban middle-class readers “back to nature” during a time of intense industrialization and urbanization. Warren discusses Burroughs’s connections not only to Muir and Roosevelt but also to his forebears Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. By tracing the complex philosophical, creative, and temperamental lineage of these six giants, Warren shows how, in their friendships and rivalries, Burroughs, Muir, and Roosevelt made the high literary romanticism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman relevant to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Americans. At the same time, Warren offers insights into the rise of the nature essay as a genre, the role of popular magazines as shapers and conveyors of public values, and the dynamism of place in terms of such opposed concepts as retreat and engagement, nature and culture, and wilderness and civilization. Because Warren draws on Burroughs’s personal, critical, and philosophical writings as well as his better-known narrative essays, readers will come away with a more informed sense of Burroughs as a literary naturalist and a major early practitioner of ecocriticism. John Burroughs and the Place of Nature helps extend the map of America’s cultural landscape during the period 1870-1920 by recovering an unfairly neglected practitioner of one of his era’s most effective forces for change: nature writing.
Thoreau’s last years have been the subject of debate for decades, but only recently have scholars and critics begun to appreciate the posthumous publications, unfinished manuscripts, and Journal entries that occupied the writer after Walden (1854). Until now, no critical reader has delved deeply enough into botany to see how Thoreau’s plant studies impact his thinking and writing. Thoreau’s Botany moves beyond general literary appreciation for the botanical works to apply Thoreau’s extensive studies of botany—from 1850 to his death in 1862—to readings of his published and unpublished works in fresh, interdisciplinary ways. Bringing together critical plant studies, ecocriticism, and environmental humanities, James Perrin Warren argues that Thoreau’s botanical excursions establish a meeting ground of science and the humanities that is only now ready to be recognized by readers of American literature and environmental literature.
An evocative and beautifully written history of some of Canada’s earliest settlers, and their search for a definitive home. In 1604, a small group of migrants fled political turmoil and famine in France to start a new colony on Canada’s east coast. Their roughly demarcated territory included what are now Canada’s Maritime provinces, land that was fought over by the British and French empires until the Acadians were finally expelled in 1755. Their diaspora persists to this day. The Acadians is the definitive history of a little-known part of the North American past, and the quintessential story of a people in search of their identity. In the absence of a state, what defines an Acadian is elusive and while today’s Acadian community centred in New Brunswick is more confident than ever, it is entering a contentious debate about its future. James Laxer’s compelling book brilliantly explores one of Canada’s oldest and most distinct cultural groups, and shows how their complex, often tragic history reflects the larger problems facing Canada and the world today.
Identifies over 8,000 individuals named in Jack County Mortuary Records (1891-1959), Eastland County Marriages (1874-1882), and Erath County Birth Affidavits (1877-1920).
Matthew J. Babcock's Private Fire: Robert Francis's Ecopoetry and Prose is an examination of the life and work of one of America's most intriguing but tragically obscure writers. Babcock uses his own personal relationship Robert Francis's work, which emphasizes conservation and connectedness to our natural surroundings, to illuminate both overtones and nuances that are undoubtedly useful to those interested in poetry and ecology. Babcock begins with a brief biographical section intended to set the tone for readers previously unfamiliar with Robert Francis and then continues into an analysis of the influence of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost on Francis's work. Starting in Chapter Three, Private Fire shifts into the realm of literary analysis and discusses various angles of Francis's work, from representations of gender and sexual identity; prose contributions, both fiction and non-fiction; religion and politics; to themes of conservation, place-making, experimental poetic styles, and asceticism, finishing with a discussion of Francis's only long narrative poem, 'Valhalla.' This poem joins other prophetic works in musing upon environmental apocalypticism. Matthew J. Babcock finishes this detailed and thoughtful volume with concluding meditations that situate Robert Francis with his contemporaries, helping readers to locate him historically and contextually amongst other 20th century writers. By using biography and literary theory as the lens through which one interprets Francis's work, Private Fire: Robert Francis's Ecopoetry and Prose successfully navigates the literary and cultural environment surrounding a poet who himself was so connected with the world around him.
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