From the Back Cover
The works of Edward Abbey have been well known to general readers since the 1960s. Now an increasing interest in nature and environmental writing has focused the attention of a new generation of readers on classics such as Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang. This volume, the first comprehensive collection of literary criticism devoted to Abbey's challenging corpus of fiction and nonfiction, couldn't be more timely or significant. From the perspective of his scholarly critics in Western American literature and environmental studies Ed Abbey is, in a word, a problem. As Peter Quigley, the volume editor comments, "The title of this collection refers to a number of references within Abbey's work. The maze is a place of myriad canyons, of wonder, and a place where the desperadoes in The Monkey Wrench Gang could lose the authorities. The coyote refers to the slippery figure in Native American myth, a figure, known to Abbey, that was always in between definition and could slip out of every trap set to catch him." In this long-awaited anthology, 18 intrepid scholars have chosen to ignore the coyote's reputation, tracking Abbey in one masterful and illuminating essay after another through the canyons of anarchist politics, philosophy, feminist literary criticism, post-structuralism, and rhetoric, as well as nature and environmental theory and activism.
