Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-340) and index.
Contents
Toxic discourse -- The place of place -- Flâneur's progress: reinhabiting the city -- Discourses of determinism -- Modernization and the claims of the natural world: Faulkner and Leopold -- Global commons as resource and as icon: imagining oceans and whales -- The misery of beasts and humans: nonanthropocentric ethics versus environmental justice -- Watershed aesthetics.
Summary
Offers a conception of the physical environment--whether built or natural--as simultaneously found and constructed, and treats imaginative representations of it as acts of both discovery and invention. A number of the chapters develop this idea through parallel studies of figures identified with either "natural" or urban settings: John Muir and Jane Addams; Aldo Leopold and William Faulkner; Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Dreiser; Wendell Berry and Gwendolyn Brooks. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, but ranging freely across national borders, this book reimagines city and country as a single complex landscape.
