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Foreword author(s)
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Kent Ryden does not deny that the natural landscape of New England is shaped by many centuries of human manipulation, but he also takes the view that nature is everywhere, close to home as well as in more remote wilderness, in the city and in the countryside. In Landscape with Figures he dissolves the border between culture and nature to merge ideas about nature, experiences in nature, and material alterations of nature.

Ryden takes his readers from the printed page directly to the field and back again-. He often bypasses books and goes to the trees from which they are made and the landscapes they evoke, then returns with a renewed appreciation for just what an interdisciplinary, historically informed approach can bring to our understanding of the natural world. By exploring McPhee's The Pine Barrens and Ehrlich's The Solace of Open Spaces, the coastal fiction of New England, surveying and Thoreau's The Maine Woods, Maine's abandoned Cumberland and Oxford Canal, and the natural bases for New England's historical identity, Ryden demonstrates again and again that nature and history are kaleidoscopically linked.

鈥淜ent Ryden has written a lovely, subtle, fascinating meditation on the ways nature and history have mingled to produce the New England landscape as we know it today. Anyone concerned about the human place in nature will gain much by reading this thoughtful and very personal book.鈥濃擶illiam Cronon, author of Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
鈥淭his book is worth its price for the disquisition on the invention of New England autumns alone; there are all sorts of nuggets here, which show the insights to be gained when critics take the natural world seriously.鈥濃擝ill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
Landscape with Figures is a masterful analysis of the environmental and cultural generators of local, regional, and mythical identity.鈥濃擩ohn R. Stilgoe, Harvard University
鈥淩yden's deeply informed, engagingly written account of how New Englanders have constructed鈥攁nd been constructed by鈥攖heir encounters with regional places is both a significant work of literary and cultural-historical scholarship and a significant act of environmental citizenship.鈥濃擫awrence Buell, author of The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Foundation of American Culture
鈥溾a] well-written, engaging, intelligent book.鈥濃Journal of American History
鈥淭he subtitle of Kent Ryden鈥檚 new book states that the subject is 鈥楴ature and Culture in New England.鈥 But as Ryden makes clear throughout this beautifully written work, his approach鈥攅qual parts folklore study, autobiography, landscape history, and literary criticism鈥攃an shed light on the 鈥榤any places in America鈥 where 鈥榦n a small and intimate scale, human culture is incorporated directly into nature,鈥 鈥he richness of this new kind of story will be apparent to anyone who reads Landscape with Figures, an exemplar of interdisciplinary methodology and a work that should serve as a model for future ecocritical scholarship.鈥濃ISLE

Paperback

ISBN-13
9780877457886
Retail price
$25.00

eBook, Perpetual

ISBN-13
9781587294068
Retail price
$25.00

Publication Details

Publication Details

Publication Date
04/25/2001
Pages
342 pages
Trim size
6 x 9 inches
Art
23 photos, 6 maps
Edition
1st