Why have so many cultures created what we call imaginative literature in the past, and still do? What prompts so many people to read literature? And how are we to understand the economy that links these producers and consumers? These and related questions plagued the author for a couple of decades before he began to set down the results of his research into the roles and functions that creative writing has had in various societies. More and more, the evidence seemed to point towards our feelings about the effects of time on our lives, and our memories of special places that enchanted or changed us. He illustrates his findings by examining a wide range of literary artifacts.
In a book that is part memoir, part documentary and part fictional narrative, Richard Bevis follows an assortment of teenage "savages" as they descend on Yellowstone Park in 1957, looking for action (and each other) while working at a variety of jobs. Blending comedy and seriousness, *Dudes and Savages: The Resonance of Yellowstone* moves from geology to romance, from history to salesmanship, from mountain climbing to practical jokes on the hapless "dudes." The book traces the well-intentioned but blundering Mason Dixon from his setting off to his return home, and in its final chapters considers the impact that Yellowstone had on him and some other characters over the years. William Wordsworth wrote, There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue, whence our minds Are nourished and invisibly repaired. Mason wonders if that summer of 1957 among the bears and geysers could have been one of them.
This is a story of two young men, fresh from school, as they travel in search of knowledge about the world and themselves. Trying to reach Africa on motor scooters, they nearly circle the Mediterranean. The impulses and questions they have are archetypal: similar tales can be told by and of many others who have undertaken their own quests at the turning point between formal education and the decisions that will shape the rest of their lives....
Bevis examines a wide range of English, European, and North American texts, literary works as well as religious, scientific, and travel writing. He surveys the literature on mountain climbing, sea voyages, desert travel, and polar exploration, and its metaphorical uses in poetry and fiction. Relying on Addison's term "the Great" rather than "the sublime," he shows how works such as Darwin's journals, Lyell's studies in geology, and de Saussure's books on the Alps helped form an outlook on nature that also found frequent literary expression. A wide-ranging, interdisciplinary work in the history of ideas, The Road to Egdon Heath traces the growth of an aesthetic sensibility that is now ubiquitous but which would have been incomprehensible prior to the Renaissance. This sensibility underlies not only much of modern literature but also our modern ideas about conservation, ecology, and environmentalism.
What were the causes of Restoration drama's licentiousness? How did the elegantly-turned comedy of Congreve become the pointed satire of Fielding? And how did Sheridan and Goldsmith reshape the materials they inherited? In the first account of the entire period for more than a decade, Richard Bevis argues that none of these questions can be answered without an understanding of Augustan and Georgian history. The years between 1660 and 1789 saw considerable political and social upheaval, which is reflected in the eclectic array of dramatic forms that is Georgian theatre's essential characteristic.
Our ancestors did not always see beauty in the starkness of deserts, mountains, and polar wastes; that was the work of ages. In The Road to Egdon Heath (1999), Richard Bevis undertook to explain how and why this change - noted by Thomas Hardy in 1878 - came about. In Images of Liberty he picks up this story in the late nineteenth century and carries it into the present time. "That the mid-1870s saw Thomas Hardy imagine Egdon Heath out of a few Dorset moors and present it as the modern standard of natural beauty; Charles Doughty go wandering with nomads in the Arabian desert; John Muir begin to write about his climbs in the Sierra Nevada; John Wesley Powell affirm the arid reality of the American West; and Herman Melville publish a long poem about the wilderness of Judaea while explorers were probing the polar oceans, is not likely to have been mere coincidence." He finds that influences as diverse as Buddhism, industrial development, climate change, and tourism have shaped attitudes toward "the Great," and even its physical reality. Bevis concludes that the impulses that drove the pioneers to Hardy's "chastened sublimity" have not passed away. "Our horizons are still spacious, still liberating, and not unknowable.
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