San Antonio College Library

In Western society we feel neither entirely at one with our fellow creatures, nor entirely separate. Over the years, nature writers have struggled, in memorable language, with this feeling of "in-betweeness." A Natural History of Nature Writing shows us how this genre combines the rigors of science with the beauty of art to make our minds and our hearts whole. The book offers a penetrating overview of the origins and development of this uniquely American...

"Coyote at Large shatters the misconception that nature writing - works that seem limited to expressing conventional awe, reverence, piety, and wonder - is a humorless genre. In this important and engaging study, Edward Abbey, Louise Erdrich, Wendell Berry, and Rachel Carson, whom the author dubs "comic moralists," command center stage. The trickster-coyote of Native American mythology appears in playful interludes, roaming at large through the prose...

An engaging blend of environmental theory and literary studies, Nature's State looks behind the myth of Alaska as America's "last frontier," a pristine and wild place on the fringes of our geographical imagination. Susan Kollin traces how this seemingly marginal space in American culture has in fact functioned to alleviate larger social anxieties about nature, ethnicity, and national identity. Kollin pays special attention to the ways in which concerns...