Under the Sign of Nature:
Explorations in Ecocriticism

This series formalizes the Press's commitment to publishing in the area known as ecocriticism -- a critical perspective that brings environmental considerations to bear within diverse scholarly contexts. Offering works of critical inquiry and narrative scholarship in environmental literature, history, sociology, and related disciplines, Under the Sign of Nature will comprise trade books, anthologies, scholarly monographs, readers, and selected paperback editions of classic works, placing particular emphasis on strong writing and an innovative, interdisciplinary approach.

Series Editors

Michael P. Branch, University of Nevada, Reno

SueEllen Campbell, Colorado State University

John Tallmadge, The Union Institute

Forthcoming Fall 2007

Out of the Shadow:
Ecopsychology, Story, and Encounters with the Land

by Rinda West

"In Out of the Shadow: Ecopsychology, Story, and Encounters with the Land, Rinda West suggests that the recovery of connection with nature may be tied to a rediscovery of the numinous. Together, these may nourish and grow from new attempts to restore wildness to the land and to psyche. If you want to know what ritual is about, how it isolates and bridges people, communities, and cultures, and of its power to bring about war and peace, healing and harmony with the earth, this is the book to read."
—Jerome S. Bernstein, Jungian analyst, author of Living in the Borderland: The Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma

Daybooks of Discovery:
Nature Diaries in Britain, 1770-1870

by Ellen Bellanca

A melange of fact, narrative, and imaginative re-creation, the nature diary played a crucial role in literature and science in a period of burgeoning knowledge about the natural world. For students and scholars of environmental history, the history of science, ecocriticism, and Victorian studies, Daybooks of Discovery will prove an essential tool for understanding this distinct genre.

Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa:
From Vermont to Italy in
the Footsteps of George Perkins Marsh

by John Elder

“This collaboration—between George Perkins Marsh and John Elder, between Vermont and Italy, between maple and olive—is one of the smartest, soundest, deepest books about the relationship between people and nature that I’ve ever read. It will be a classic.”
—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

Westernness:
A Meditation

by Alan Williamson

A first-person meditation on the literary and visual arts of the American West, Westernness: A Meditation explores how this region has developed its own distinct culture, in literature and painting, from the point of view of someone who has been, at different times in his life, both a westerner and an easterner. An engaging and astute reader and observer, Alan Williamson uses his poetic lens to examine the new connections, notably with the Far East, that have been forged in the West, but also the fear, anxiety, and sense of cultural vacancy that western artists have had to overcome in confronting their new landscape, much as the writers of the American Renaissance did a century earlier.

Topographies of the Sacred:
The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism

by Kate Rigby

Although the British romantic poets have been the subjects of previous ecocritical examinations, Kate Rigby's Topographies of the Sacred is the first book to compare English and German literary models of romanticism. Rigby treats not only canonical British romantics but an array of major figures in Continental literature, philosophy, and natural history, including Rousseau, Herder, Goethe, Schelling, Schiller, and Alexander von Humboldt. Following the pioneering work of Jonathan Bate and Karl Kroeber, she probes romantic understandings of nature, the source of the sacred, the power of place, and the role of literature, with a view to uncovering the tensions and ambivalences within the European romantic tradition. The result is a synthetic and philosophically inflected study that looks at the literary and ecological significance of place within a broad cultural context.

Mary Austin's Regionalism:
Reflections on Gender, Genre, and Geography

by Heike Schaefer

Over the past decade a number of Mary Austin’s books have been reissued and her work has been the subject of increasing critical attention. Heike Schaefer’s study complements that renewed interest with a fresh, broad appreciation of the complexity of Austin’s work. Considering unpublished materials and the full range of Austin’s literary and theoretical writing, Mary Austin’s Regionalism: Reflections on Gender, Genre, and Geography presents Austin as a significant early twentieth-century author who reworked the traditions of nature writing and women’s regionalism to envision a sustainable and democratic American culture.

Eco-Man:
New Perspectives on Masculinity and Nature

Edited by Mark Allister

The paradoxical role nature plays in American myth and history grows in part from the male's reverent fascination with the wilderness and his equally strong impulse to dominate it. This tension lies at the heart of Eco-Man, which brings together two rapidly growing fields: men's studies and ecocritcism. The two disciplines have rarely if ever touched on each other; brought together, men's studies is freed from its typical limitation of an exclusively urban-centered perspoective, while ecocriticism engages an "ecomasculine" lens through which to view the field.

Lines on the Land:
Writers, Art, and the National Parks

by Scott Herring

The earliest artists and writers to observe America's national parks established aesthetic categories that exist to this day. Scott Herring contends that these pioneers were canon makers, recognizing the parks as naturally occurring works of art and conferring upon them a cultural prestige. This spirit of celebration gave way, however, to a sense of "outraged idealism," as later generations were faced with a changing culture that had imperfectly absorbed, and even misrepresented, the national-park aesthetic. Herring traces this shift in the work of a wide spectrum of creative minds and relates the book's chief themes to his own experiences in Yellowstone.

Practical Ecocriticism:
Literature, Biology, and the Environment

by Glen A. Love

Practical Ecocriticism, a book many years in the writing, is essentially a diagram for how to think ecocritically. Glen Love begins with an overview of the field of literature and the environment, argues in favor of a biological theoretical base for literary studies, and then aims the lens of this scientifically informed critical perspective at the pastoral genre and at the current biocultural rediscovery of human nature. The result is the first book to ground environmental criticism in the life sciences, particularly ecology, and to attempt to bridge the ever widening gulf between the Two Cultures.

by Robert Bernard Hass

Arguing that the central problem of Frost’s career was his conflict with science, Robert Bernard Hass examines the ways in which the conflict affected the development of Frost’s career from beginning to end. In this engaging and substantial exploration of Frost and the philosophical and scientific currents that influenced him, Hass situates the poet as a foundational figure in ecocritical thought.

by Stephen Adams

A blend of history, literature, geology, geography, and natural history, Adams's book focuses on both the physical changes to the land over time and the changes in the way people viewed Virginia.

by Mark Allister

"There is profound merit in locating the field of nature writing, and particularly the authors and works emphasized in this study, within the tradition of autobiographical nonfiction and, still more specifically, within the genre of healing narratives. Mark Allister's Refiguring the Map of Sorrow is a genuinely excellent contribution to the study of contemporary American literature."

--Scott Slovic, University of Nevada, Reno

Beyond Nature Writing:
Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism

edited by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace

"These essays illustrate the considerable range in both subject matter and critical tactics available to and through ecocriticism; they chart out a wide, varied, and inviting new territory for teaching and research."

--SueEllen Campbell, Colorado State University

Story Line:
Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail

by Ian Marshall

"One part guidebook and two parts exploration into literary history and theory, Story Line is a joy for people who like to walk and read. Marshall is a keen observer, a dogged researcher and a terrific writer. . . . It would have been a successful book had Marshall done nothing more than persuade readers that walking on the Appalachian Trail is still the best way to encounter the East's forested landscape. He has accomplished much more than that. He's also blazed an engrossing new path to experience some of its finest literature."

Back from the Far Field:
American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century

by Bernard W. Quetchenbach

Many poets writing after World War II have found the individual focus of contemporary poetics poorly suited to making statements directed at public issues and public ethics. The desire to invest such individualized poetry with greater cultural authority presented difficulties for Vietnam-protest poets, and it has been a particular challenge for nature writers in the Thoreau tradition who have attempted to serve as advocates for the natural world. Quetchenbach assesses how such postwar poets as Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, and Wendell Berry have dealt with this dilemma.

Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature

by Patrick D. Murphy

Arguing that the field of ecocriticism has matured to the point where it requires a thorough critique and new theoretical underpinnings, Patrick D. Murphy suggests a variety of ways ecocriticism can become more inclusive in its objects of study and more sophisticated in its methodologies.

"A wonderful contribution to ecocriticism, advancing the field in many exciting ways. This is a book that will stimulate others to read new books, teach new kinds of classes, conceive of ecocriticism differently. It will contribute to a transformation of our thinking."

Cheryll Glotfelty, University of Nevada, Reno

Shifting the Ground: American Women Writers Revisions of Nature, Gender and Race

by Rachel Stein

In Shifting the Ground, Rachel Stein adds a feminist slant to the field of ecocriticism. Americans have historically defined themselves in terms of their conquest of "virgin land." Unfortunately, this identification has often proved disastrous to groups such as women, Native Americans, and African Americans, who were regarded as nature incarnate, part of the ground that must be mastered in the name of nation.

Recasting authors like Emily Dickinson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Leslie Marmon Silko against the backdrop of conquest rhetoric, Stein offers provocative new readings of their texts. Her book paves the way for further development of ecocriticism and ecofeminist theory with regard to American women writers.