Description:
The Woods Stretched for Miles gathers essays about southern landscape and nature from nineteen writers with geographic or ancestral ties to the region. Bland Simpson's chapter is entitled "The Great Dismal."
From the savannas of south Florida through the hardwood uplands of Mississippi to the coastal rivers of the Carolinas and the high mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, the range in geography covered is equally broad. With insight and eloquence, these diverse talents take up similar themes: environmental restoration, the interplay between individual and community, the definition of wildness in an area transformed by human activity, and the meaning of our reactions to the natural world.
Readers will treasure the passionate and intelligent honorings of land and nature offered by this rich anthology. With the publication of The Woods Stretched for Miles, southern voices establish their abiding place in the ever-popular nature writing genre.
Book Review #1:
"This is an important book?the first of its kind
exclusively on the Southeast. It should appeal to general readers who
wish to read about the genre in the Southeast, about the long and
complex relationship between American culture and nature, and also about
controversial environmental issues in the region."
?John Murray, editor of American Nature Writing
Book Review #2:
"I am delighted with the very concept of this
anthology of Southern nature writing. There are dozens and dozens of
recent scholarly books on environmental literature and anthologies of
nonfiction nature writing, nature poetry, and environmental writing in
general, including a number of regionally oriented collections. But, so
far, other than Molly Westling's ecocritical studies of Southern
fiction, few of these recent publications are explicitly devoted to
Southern environmental literature. For this reason, there is a
significant void that the The Woods Stretched for Miles is intended to fill?and I think it fills the void quite well."
?Scott Slovic, author of Being in the World: An Environmental Reader for Writers
