"Reconnecting with John Muir is a fascinating look at the discourses of environment from the perspective of a British teacher, critic, mountaineer, and poet. Terry Gifford's Muir is more interesting and varied than the Muir Americans have been creating: Gifford's Muir is a Scot, writing in the context of a British tradition of aesthetics and mountaineering." --Michael P. Cohen, author of The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness
"This timely, wise, consistently insightful book by one of Britain's leading ecocritics is an indispensable study of John Muir, but also much more than that. It unfolds more fully than ever before Gifford's important theory of the 'post-pastoral,' perceptively engaging a wide range of environmental writers. The form of the book's argument is itself highly instructive. Gifford offers a strongly argued assessment and example of the principles of what has come to be called 'narrative scholarship,' the interweave of creative practice, critical writing, pedagogy, and in-field experience that characterizes some of the most innovative work in the field today. Gifford's transatlantic perspective is additionally illuminating. Altogether, anyone with a serious interest in the fast-burgeoning and now-worldwide 'green' turn in literary studies, and in why it is much more consequential than a mere school of literary criticism, will find much to admire in Gifford's penetrating, wide-ranging, but highly accessible account." --Lawrence Buell, author of The Future of Environmental Criticism
"Who better than Terry Gifford to help us reconnect with John Muir? Like Muir, he is a mountaineer, an ardent environmentalist, a lover of the natural landscape, and a venturesome writer--a nature poet. His laudable ambition, in Reconnecting with John Muir, is to define and exemplify the new mode--he calls it 'post-pastoral'--that is emerging at the confluence of two sets of venerable literary conventions: those of nature writing and the pastoral. My favorite example of what Gifford calls 'post-pastoral practice' is his own imaginative, down-to-earth chapter on teaching literature in the service of environmental awareness. It is filled with wonderfully fresh, practical ideas about helping students connect their literary and firsthand experience of the natural world." --Leo Marx, Professor Emeritus of Science and Technology at MIT
"[I]nsightful.... What I find deeply satisfying about this book is the way it brings all parts of a life into play. It advocates the breaching of boundaries that have been constructed and policed between disciplines, showing how to join up and draw on our many-sidedness." --Fiona Owen, Green Letters
"Who better than Terry Gifford to help us reconnect with John Muir? Like Muir, he is a mountaineer, an ardent environmentalist, a lover of the natural landscape, and a venturesome writer--a nature poet. His laudable ambition, in Reconnecting with John Muir, is to define and exemplify the new mode--he calls it 'post-pastoral'--that is emerging at the confluence of two sets of venerable literary conventions: those of nature writing and the pastoral. My favorite example of what Gifford calls 'post-pastoral practice' is his own imaginative, down-to-earth chapter on teaching literature in the service of environmental awareness. It is filled with wonderfully fresh, practical ideas about helping students connect their literary and firsthand experience of the natural world." --Leo Marx, Professor Emeritus of Science and Technology at MIT
