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| For Love of the World: Essays on Nature Writers
ISBN: 9781587291814
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Iowa Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: American literature -- History and criticism; Natural history -- United States -- Historiography; Nature in literature;
Along with poets, philosophers, and deep ecologists, nature writers--who may be something of all three--address the world alienation of Western civilization. By example as well as with words, they teach us to turn from the self to the world, from ego to ecos. In these deeply felt meditative essays, Sherman Paul contemplates the cosmological homecoming of nature writers who show us how to reenter the world, participate in it, and recover respect for it. In For Love of the World Sherman Paul considers Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, major writers in the American tradition of nature writing; Henry Beston and Loren Eiseley, writers not yet so canonical; and Richard Nelson and Barry Lopez, our estimable contemporaries. Paul's meditative mode follows the practice of naturalists who enter the field, come into the open, and relate their immediate experiences. In the most primary and direct way, his essays belong to our moment in history when nothing is more essential than our reattachment to earthly existence. They will reawaken our love of the world--the necessary eros of ecos --and our wonder at and gratitude for being.
Sherman Paul is Carver Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Iowa. He is the author of a number of books, including The Music of Survival , Hart's Bridge , Olson's Push , The Lost America of Love , and In Search of the Primitive . |
