Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and the Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present
John Gatta
Abstract
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. In this book, the author suggests that the religious import of 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.”
Keywords: American literature, religion, environment, ecocriticism, ecological, natural revelation, biblical hermeneutics, Henry Thoreau, John Muir, Rachel Carson
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2004 | Print ISBN-13: 9780195165050 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2005 | DOI:10.1093/0195165055.001.0001 |
