About this item
Highlights
- Taking its name from the subtitle of William Least Heat-Moon's PrairyErth (a deep map), the "deep-map" form of nonfiction and environmental writing defines an innovative and stratigraphic literary genre.
- About the Author: Susan Naramore Maher is dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.
- 256 Pages
- Literary Criticism, American
Description
About the Book
"Taking its name from the subtitle of William Least Heat-Moon's PrairyErth (a deep map), the "deep-map" form of nonfiction and environmental writing defines an innovative and stratigraphic literary genre. Proposing that its roots can be found in Great Plains nonfiction writing, Susan Naramore Maher explores the many facets of this vital form of critique, exploration, and celebration that weaves together such elements of narrative as natural history, cultural history, geography, memoir, and intertextuality. Maher's Deep Map Country gives readers the first book-length study of the deep-map nonfiction of the Great Plains region, featuring writers as diverse as Julene Bair, Sharon Butala, Loren Eiseley, Don Gayton, Linda Hasselstrom, William Least Heat-Moon, John Janovy Jr., John McPhee, Kathleen Norris, and Wallace Stegner. Deep Map Country examines the many layers of storytelling woven into their essays: the deep time of geology and evolutionary biology; the cultural history of indigenous and settlement communities; the personal stories of encounters with this expansive terrain; the political and industrial stories that have affected the original biome and Plains economies; and the spiritual dimensions of the physical environment that press on everyday realities. "--Book Synopsis
Taking its name from the subtitle of William Least Heat-Moon's PrairyErth (a deep map), the "deep-map" form of nonfiction and environmental writing defines an innovative and stratigraphic literary genre. Proposing that its roots can be found in Great Plains nonfiction writing, Susan Naramore Maher explores the many facets of this vital form of critique, exploration, and celebration that weaves together such elements of narrative as natural history, cultural history, geography, memoir, and intertextuality. Maher's Deep Map Country gives readers the first book-length study of the deep-map nonfiction of the Great Plains region, featuring writers as diverse as Julene Bair, Sharon Butala, Loren Eiseley, Don Gayton, Linda Hasselstrom, William Least Heat-Moon, John Janovy Jr., John McPhee, Kathleen Norris, and Wallace Stegner. Deep Map Country examines the many layers of storytelling woven into their essays: the deep time of geology and evolutionary biology; the cultural history of indigenous and settlement communities; the personal stories of encounters with this expansive terrain; the political and industrial stories that have affected the original biome and Plains economies; and the spiritual dimensions of the physical environment that press on everyday realities.Review Quotes
"Deep Map Country will become the standard to which other interdisciplinary and 'thick' discussions of Great Plains works will be compared."--Diane Quantic, author of The Nature of the Place: A Study of Great Plains Fiction
-- (9/23/2013 12:00:00 AM)
"What Maher describes is both a literary aesthetic and an ethos, and she chronicles a significant development in the literary culture of Plains writers."--Rick Van Noy, author of Surveying the Interior: Literary Cartographers and the Sense of Place
-- (9/23/2013 12:00:00 AM)
"If deep mapping is a sensibility more than anything else, Maher does an excellent job of taking that sensibility off the pages of others and using it to shape her own."--Kent C. Ryden, Journal of American Studies
"Literary cartography seeks to express, explore, accentuate, and add dimensionality to places that often seem blank or empty on maps, and featureless to newcomers. Maher's study of this genre's imprint on the region, Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography on the Great Plains, is an essential synthesis to a body of work that transcends and frequently ignores disciplinary, cultural, and national boundaries."--Matthew S. Luckett, Middle West Review
"Maher's study is a significant contribution to narrative theory and criticism, as well as to literary geography, but Deep Map Country ought to be especially valuable to anyone interested in the contemporary West, its history, and its future."--Robert T. Tally Jr., Western American Literature
"Susan Naramore Maher's Deep Map Country provides a seminal, expansive study of major nonfiction authors whose work grows out of and into the Great Plains, intersecting with its history, biology, sociology, temporality, and spirituality."--Gary Dop, Great Plains Quarterly
"While Deep Map Country offers an important contribution to the growing body of work focused on the literature of the Great Plains, it also provides a kind of template for future ecocritical explorations of other deeply mapped bioregions."--Matthew Cella, Cultural Geographies
About the Author
Susan Naramore Maher is dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. She is coeditor of Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley (Nebraska, 2012) and Coming into McPhee Country: John McPhee and the Art of Literary Nonfiction.