A collection of new essays establishes women's voices as a powerful presence in US nature writing.
Such News of the Land shows how women nature writers used nature essays, regional sketches, fiction, and science to enlarge the audience for whom nature mattered. Approaching the subject from literary criticism, history, and anthropology, 19 contributors and the editors make a case for raising our appreciation of the role women nature writers have played in the creation of an American literature and an American identity.
This path-breaking collection expands the definition of the genre itself. Embracing two centuries and treating a variety of regions and cultures, these essays discuss traditional nature writers such as Susan Fenimore Cooper, Mary Austin, Gene Stratton Porter, and Annie Dillard, as well as the contributions of authors ranging from Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Leslie Marmon Silko, to Willa Cather and Sarah Orne Jewett. Unconventional sources such as market bulletins or women's gardens stand alongside germinal texts such as Marjory Stoneman Douglas's The Everglades: River of Grass as source material for examining the ways women have shaped our view of the land.
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From the Book:
"At a time when landmark legislation -- such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Wilderness Act, and the Endangered Species Act -- all seem threatened, those concerned with the future of environmentalism in the 21st century are looking for ways to engage a broader public. Doing so requires that a tradition usually perceived as the domain of a white, male elite recognizes the contributions of women and people of color to the national discourse on the meaning and value of nature in America. Such News of the Land offers an excellent place to begin the search for the next wave of environmentalism." -- from the Foreword by Vera Norwood
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Thomas S. Edwards is Dean of Academic Affairs at Thomas College in Waterville, Maine, and co-editor of Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon (1999). Elizabeth A. De Wolfe is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine. Vera Norwood, Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and author of Made From This Earth (1993), provides a Foreword.
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