San Antonio College Library

"In classical terms the georgic celebrates the working landscape, cultivated to become fruitful and prosperous, in contrast to the idealized or fanciful landscapes of the pastoral. Arguing that economic considerations must become central to any understanding of the human community's engagement with the natural environment, Timothy Sweet identifies a distinct literary mode he calls the American georgic. Offering a fresh approach to ecocritical and...

"Drawing on recent studies in cultural geography, environmental history, and mythology, as well as literary criticism, The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland relates Midwestern pastoral writers to their local geographies and explains their approaches. William Barillas treats five important Midwestern pastoralists - Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison - in separate...

"What has the city meant to Americans? James L. Machor explores this question in a provocative analysis of American responses to urbanization in the context of the culture's tendency to valorize nature and the rural world. Although much attention has been paid to American rural-urban relations, Machor focuses on a dimension largely overlooked by those seeking to explain American conceptions of the city. While urban historians and literary critics...

Provides an overview of the life and career of author Garrison Keillor, along with scholarly readings of seven of his works and a primary and secondary bibliography.

"In History's Grip concentrates on the literature of Philip Roth, one of America's greatest writers, and in particular on American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. Each of these novels from the 1990s uses Newark, New Jersey, to explore American history and character. Each features a protagonist who grows up in and then leaves Newark, after which he is undone by a historically generated crisis. The city's twentieth-century decline...

The story of a middle-aged man who runs a rural diner and the young, plain girl who drifts into his life. "At the heart of John Gardner's Nickel Mountain is an uncommon love story: when at 42, the obese, anxious, and gentle Henry Soames marries seventeen-year-old Callie Wells--who is pregnant with the child of a local boy--it is much more than years which define the gulf between them. But the beauty of this novel is the gradual revelation of the...