Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains
Taking its name from the subtitle of William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth (a deep map), the “deep-map” form of nonfiction and environmental writing defines an innovative and stratigraphic literary genre. Proposing that its roots can be found in Great Plains nonfiction writing, Susan Naramore Maher explores the many facets of this vital form of critique, exploration, and celebration that weaves together such elements of narrative as natural history, cultural history, geography, memoir, and intertextuality.  Maher’s Deep Map Country gives readers the first book-length study of the deep-map nonfiction of the Great Plains region, featuring writers as diverse as Julene Bair, Sharon Butala, Loren Eiseley, Don Gayton, Linda Hasselstrom, William Least Heat-Moon, John Janovy Jr., John McPhee, Kathleen Norris, and Wallace Stegner. Deep Map Country examines the many layers of storytelling woven into their essays: the deep time of geology and evolutionary biology; the cultural history of indigenous and settlement communities; the personal stories of encounters with this expansive terrain; the political and industrial stories that have affected the original biome and Plains economies; and the spiritual dimensions of the physical environment that press on everyday realities.  
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Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains
Taking its name from the subtitle of William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth (a deep map), the “deep-map” form of nonfiction and environmental writing defines an innovative and stratigraphic literary genre. Proposing that its roots can be found in Great Plains nonfiction writing, Susan Naramore Maher explores the many facets of this vital form of critique, exploration, and celebration that weaves together such elements of narrative as natural history, cultural history, geography, memoir, and intertextuality.  Maher’s Deep Map Country gives readers the first book-length study of the deep-map nonfiction of the Great Plains region, featuring writers as diverse as Julene Bair, Sharon Butala, Loren Eiseley, Don Gayton, Linda Hasselstrom, William Least Heat-Moon, John Janovy Jr., John McPhee, Kathleen Norris, and Wallace Stegner. Deep Map Country examines the many layers of storytelling woven into their essays: the deep time of geology and evolutionary biology; the cultural history of indigenous and settlement communities; the personal stories of encounters with this expansive terrain; the political and industrial stories that have affected the original biome and Plains economies; and the spiritual dimensions of the physical environment that press on everyday realities.  
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Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains

Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains

by Susan Naramore Maher
Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains

Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains

by Susan Naramore Maher

Overview

Taking its name from the subtitle of William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth (a deep map), the “deep-map” form of nonfiction and environmental writing defines an innovative and stratigraphic literary genre. Proposing that its roots can be found in Great Plains nonfiction writing, Susan Naramore Maher explores the many facets of this vital form of critique, exploration, and celebration that weaves together such elements of narrative as natural history, cultural history, geography, memoir, and intertextuality.  Maher’s Deep Map Country gives readers the first book-length study of the deep-map nonfiction of the Great Plains region, featuring writers as diverse as Julene Bair, Sharon Butala, Loren Eiseley, Don Gayton, Linda Hasselstrom, William Least Heat-Moon, John Janovy Jr., John McPhee, Kathleen Norris, and Wallace Stegner. Deep Map Country examines the many layers of storytelling woven into their essays: the deep time of geology and evolutionary biology; the cultural history of indigenous and settlement communities; the personal stories of encounters with this expansive terrain; the political and industrial stories that have affected the original biome and Plains economies; and the spiritual dimensions of the physical environment that press on everyday realities.  

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780803255036
Publisher: Nebraska
Publication date: 05/01/2014
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 280
File size: 615 KB

About the Author

Susan Naramore Maher is dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. She is coeditor of Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley (Nebraska, 2012) and Coming into McPhee Country: John McPhee and the Art of Literary Nonfiction.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgments xxi

1 Deep Mapping the Great Plains: Surveying the Literary Cartography of Place 1

2 Deep Mapping History: Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow and William Least Heat-Moon's PrairyErth: (a deep map) 35

3 Deep Mapping the Biome: The Biology of Place in Don Gayton's The Wheatgrass Mechanism, John Janovy Jr.'s Dunwoody Pond, and Wes Jackson's Becoming Native to This Place 71

4 Deep Mapping Dimensions: Excavating Time and Space in Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey and John McPhee's Rising from the Plains 105

5 Deep Mapping Lived Space: "Layers of Presence" in Julene Bair's One Degree West, Sharon Butala's Wild Stone Heart, and Linda Hasselstrom's Feels Like Far 138

6 Coda: Spiritual Deep Mapping and Great Plains Vernacular 169

Notes 189

Bibliography 207

Index 215

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