A terrible beauty : the wilderness of American literature

Format:

Book

Title:

A terrible beauty : the wilderness of American literature

Author:

Raskin, Jonah, 1942- author

ISBN:

9781587902789

Publication:

Berkeley, California : Regent Press, [2014]

Physical Description:

366 pages ; 23 cm.

Contents:

Ah, wilderness -- Explorers & colonists: Sebastian Cabot, Henry Hudson, Robert Juet & William Bradford -- Puritans: Roger Williams, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather & William Faulkner -- Revolutionaries: Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, J. Hector Crevecoueur, Philip Freneau & Washington Irving -- Continental: Meriwether Lewis, William Clark & Sacagawea -- Pioneers: James Fenimore Cooper's wild literary ride -- Pale faces & redskins: Robert Baird, Catharine Sedgwick & Lydia Maria Child -- Radicals: Margaret Fuller & Henry David Thoreau -- Allegorical: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville & John Muir -- Coquette: Emily Dickinson -- Satirical: Mark Twain -- Twentieth century & beyond: Jack London, Mary Austin, Willa Cather & F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Summary:

Shortly before he published Walden; or Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau called "The library a wilderness of books." He also noted that while Americans were "clearing the forest in our westward progress, we are accumulating a forest of books in our rear, as wild and unexplored as any of nature's primitive wildernesses." In A Terrible Beauty: The Wilderness of American Literature, Jonah Raskin takes a long close look at the forest of books that poets, novelists and essayists mapped and explored before and after Thoreau. The first work of cultural criticism to look back at writing in the United States from the perspective of the contemporary environmental crisis, Raskin offers insights for students, teachers and lovers of literature as well as for backpackers and hikers who have trekked across untrammeled forests, deserts and mountains.

Subject(s):

American literature -- History and criticism.

Environmentalism in literature.

Wilderness areas in literature.

Wilderness areas -- United States.

Geographic Term:

United States.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Salem Main Library	810.9 Raskin 2014	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Silver Falls Library	810.9 RASKIN	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

ABOUT THE BOOK Shortly before he published Walden; or Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau called ¿The library a wilderness of books.¿ He also noted that while Americans were ¿clearing the forest in our westward progress, we are accumulating a forest of books in our rear, as wild and unexplored as any of nature¿s primitive wildernesses.¿ In "A Terrible Beauty: the Wilderness of American Literature," Jonah Raskin takes a long close look at the forest of books that poets, novelists and essayists mapped and explored before and after Thoreau. The first work of cultural criticism to look back at writing in the United States from the perspective of the contemporary environmental crisis, Raskin offers insights for students, teachers and lovers of literature as well as for backpackers and hikers who have trekked across untrammeled forests, deserts and mountains. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jonah Raskin, Phd, has taught American literature at Sonoma State University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook and as a Fulbright professor at the University of Antwerp and the University of Ghent in Belgium. The author of fifteen books, he earned his B.A. at Columbia College in New York, his M.A. at Columbia University and his Ph.D. at the University of Manchester, Manchester, England. He lives in northern California and has written for The San Francisco Chronicle, The L.A. Times, The Nation, The Redwood Coast Review and Catamaran.

Reviews (1)

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Raskin has been a radical, a journalist, and a professor, and his many books include works about Allen Ginsberg and organic farming. Now, in this time of escalating environmental concerns, he taps into his passion for American literature to investigate the role wilderness has played as both inspiration and theme. Raskin identifies Roger Williams, the wildest Puritan, as the first to write about the presence and metaphorical power of the American wilderness, a magnificently verdant abundance that was rapidly and recklessly decimated, along with the lives of native peoples, even as the act of clearing the land forged the American national character. The resulting duality of frontier heroism versus shame and guilt gave rise to the complex and enduring works of the nineteenth century Raskin revisits so fruitfully. His deep reading of Hawthorne and Thoreau is robust and newly illuminating, and he writes with verve and intensity about the wondrous complexity of Melville's Moby-Dick, Dickinson's deft soundings of our psychological wilderness, and Twain's dissection of American paradoxes. His dive into F. Scott Fitzgerald's haunting vision of America's lost dreams and Marilynne Robinson's nature-soaked novel, Housekeeping, are dramatic and moving. Raskin's unique and evocative mapping of the sustained and ravishing literary inquiry into the meaning and necessity of American wilderness revives our sense of awe for nature and art.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist