Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature
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By David Oates
March 2003. 6 x 9 inches. 320 pages.
ISBN 0-87071-553-4. Paperback, $21.95.
Table of Contents
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As a lifelong mountaineer and reader of nature literature, as a scholar, as
a descendant of naturalist William Bartram, and as a gay ex-Baptist who took
to the mountains to test his masculinity, David Oates has thought deeply
about how nature and culture interact in our lives.
In this lively, genre-hopping book, Oates tells stories, explores the
literature of nature, and analyzes how the misapplied myth of Eden has mired
Americans in a hopeless "Paradise Lost" mentality that belies the true,
ever-present wildness in our lives. Paradise Wild will move and provoke
readers, at the same time that it contributes to the ongoing debate over the
meanings of "nature" and "wilderness."
Oates argues that mourning for a lost paradise is a dead end that cannot
help us combat the real damage we're doing to ourselves and the rest of the
world. He proposes a healthy re-mythologizing of the Eden story as a way of
celebrating "wildness"- the Eden in each moment and in each cell, that
cannot be lost. His book is about welcoming that wildness into the midst of
daily life.
Readers interested in how we think about nature-in ecological politics,
environmental literature and philosophy, nature writing, cultural studies,
and queer studies-will welcome this bold and original new work.
"Paradise Wild is the most exuberant blend of reflection, scholarship and
persuasion to come along in many years. The book breaks open the hollow
pieties of nature writing to reveal how an engaged and embracing mind-and
body-is itself one of nature's most beautiful expressions of wildness. Oates
writes lyrically and with healing irreverence about experience and
literature in a way that makes all the old polarizing categories-'saved and
damned, straight and gay, sacred and profane'-melt away. This is an
important and illuminating book-way overdue as a new look at nature, mind
and body."
--Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Writing the Sacred into the Real
"Paradise Wild stands out as a unique text among the recent crop of
environmental studies books. I know of no other book that touches on a
diverse range of issues to the extent that Oates does: . . .
interconnections between nature, the body, sexuality, society, writing,
thinking and spirituality. Paradise Wild incorporates personal narrative
with critical analysis, producing in the process one of the best attempts I
know at writing for both an academic and popular audience."
--Susan Kollin, author of Nature's State: Imagining Alaska as the Last
Frontier
About the Author
David Oates is the author of
Earth Rising: Ecological Belief in an Age of Science,(OSU Press) and
Peace in Exile: Poems(Oyster River Press). He teaches English at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, and lives in Portland, Oregon
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