Front cover image for Reading the roots : American nature writing before Walden

Reading the roots : American nature writing before Walden

"Reading the Roots is an unprecedented anthology of outstanding early writings about American nature--a rich, influential, yet critically underappreciated body of work. Rather than begin with Henry David Thoreau, who is often identified as the progenitor of American nature writing, editor Michael P. Branch instead surveys the long tradition that prefigures and anticipates Thoreau and his literary descendants. The selections in Reading the Roots describe a diversity of landscapes, wildlife, and natural phenomena, and their authors represent many different nationalities, cultural affiliations, religious views, and ideological perspectives. The writings gathered here also range widely in terms of subject, rhetorical form, and disciplinary approach--from promotional tracts and European narratives of contact with Native Americans to examples of scientific theology and romantic nature writing."--Publisher's description
Print Book, English, ©2004
University of Georgia Press, Athens, ©2004
Anthologies (form)
xxxi, 408 pages ; 25 cm
9780820325477, 9780820325484, 0820325473, 0820325481
52819787
Christopher Columbus
Amerigo Vespucci
Pietro Martire d'Anghiera
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés
Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera
Jean Ribaut
Thomas Hariot
John Smith
William Wood
Thomas Morton
Anne Bradstreet
John Josselyn
Jasper Danckaerts
Louis Hennepin
Sarah Kemble Knight
Robert Beverley
John Lawson
Cotton Mather
Jonathan Edwards
Paul Dudley
Mark Catesby
Eliza Lucas Pinckney
Peter Kalm
Benjamin Franklin
John Winthrop
Pedro Font
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur
John Ferdinand Dalziel Smyth
Thomas Jefferson
William Bartram
James Smith
Charles Willson Peale
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
Alexander Wilson
John Bradbury
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
Timothy Dwight
Edwin James
Solomon Bayley
Timothy Flint
Anne Newport Royall
Franc̜ois-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand
John James Audubon
Ralph Waldo Emerson
John D. Godman
Washington Irving
Thomas Cole
Harriet Martineau
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Bame-wa-was-ge-zhik-a-quay) (Ojibwa) and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
John Kirk Townsend
Nicolas Point
George Catlin
Lucy Hooper
Nathaniel Hawthorne
William Cullen Bryant
Margaret Fuller
John C. Frémont and Jessie Benton Frémont
George Copway (Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh) (Ojibwa)
Henry David Thoreau
Susan Fenimore Cooper
Howard Stansbury
Fredrika Bremer