Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present / Edition 1

by John Gatta

Overview

Since colonial times, the sense of encountering an unseen, transcendental Presence within the natural world has been a characteristic motif in American literature and culture. American writers have repeatedly perceived in nature something beyond itself-and beyond themselves. In this book, John Gatta argues that the religious import of American environmental literature has yet to be fully recognized or understood. Whatever their theology, American writers have perennially construed the nonhuman world to be a source, in Rachel Carson's words, of "something that takes us out of ourselves."
Making Nature Sacred explores how the quest for "natural revelation" has been pursued through successive phases of American literary and intellectual history. And it shows how the imaginative challenge of "reading" landscapes has been influenced by biblical hermeneutics. Though focused on adaptations of Judeo-Christian religious traditions, it also samples Native American, African American, and Buddhist forms of ecospirituality. It begins with Colonial New England writers such Anne Bradstreet and Jonathan Edwards, re-examines pivotal figures such as Henry Thoreau and John Muir, and takes account of writings by Mary Austin, Rachel Carson, and many others along the way. The book concludes with an assessment of the "spiritual renaissance" underway in current environmental writing, as represented by five noteworthy poets and by authors such as Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson, Peter Matthiessen, and Barry Lopez.
This engaging study should appeal not only to students of literature, but also to those interested in ethics and environmental studies, religious studies, and American cultural history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195165067
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/14/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	9.16(w) x 6.24(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

John Gatta is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of American Madonna: Images of the Divine Woman in Literary Culture (OUP, 1997) and a variety of other publications concerning the interplay between religion and literature.

Editorial Reviews

"This is a subtle, learned, and complex book that makes important contributions to ecocriticism and to the ongoing discussion of the persistence of responses to the natural world that it makes sense to characterize as religious." —Christianity and Literature

"Gatta offers spiritual and imaginative hope for an age set on despair."—CHOICE

"Required reading for anyone interested not only in ecocriticism but also in an interdisciplinary approach to Christian nature spirituality."—Laurie J. Braaten, Professor of Biblical Studies, Judson College

"Gatta's ambitious work lushly draws the reader into Nature as the setting out of which the United States of America emerged.... [W]e commend Gatta's accomplishment." —Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

From the Publisher