Scholarship of literature and the environment demonstrates myriad understandings of nature and culture. While some work in the field results in approaches that belong in the realm of cultural studies, other scholars have expanded the boundaries of ecocriticism to connect the practice more explicitly to disciplines such as the biological sciences, human geography, or philosophy. Even so, the field of ecocriticism has yet to clearly articulate its interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary natu...

Examines the intersection of male and female spheres in American literatureAlthough they wrote in the same historical milieu as their male counterparts, women writers of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries have generally been "ghettoized" by critics into a separate canonical sphere. These original essays argue in favor of reconciling male and female writers, both historically and in the context of classroom teaching.While some of the essays pair up ...

This unique collection of narratives, essays, and poems includes an original interview with Maya Angelou and pieces by Naomi Shihab Nye, Pat Mora, Rosemary Catacalos, and many others. Each work relates how women have demonstrated courage by taking a risk that has changed their lives. The Introduction explores courage not as a battlefield quality, but as the result of thoughtful choices demonstrating integrity and self-awareness. Each section opens with a description of its organization and...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Maya Angelou shares her path to living well and with meaning in this absorbing book of personal essays.Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lesso...

What are those life experiences that catch us by surprise, that haven't ever been part of our discussions or readings because they lie beyond the limit of words or the courage and will to articulate? When Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson began asking other women - friends, colleagues, family members - what experiences had amazed them, disappointed them, caught them unprepared, the responses were immediate. Many women reacted as though this question was something they had been waiting to...

What does it mean to devote yourself wholly to helping others? In Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar seeks out people living lives of extreme ethical commitment and tells their deeply intimate stories; their stubborn integrity and their compromises; their bravery and their recklessness; their joys and defeats and wrenching dilemmas.A couple adopts two children in distress. But then they think: If they can change two lives, why not four? Or ten? They adopt twenty. But ...

**“A breezy, inviting collection of love poems that celebrates the divine as much as it does the natural world or human relationships . . . An eloquent celebration of simple joy from one of America’s most beloved poets.” —The Washington Post“Oliver’s poems are thoroughly convincing—as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring.” —New York Times Book ReviewMary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, celebrates love in this colle...

Story is the heart of language. Story moves us to love and hate and can motivate us to change the whole course of our lives. Story can lift us beyond our individual borders to imagine the realities of other people, times, and places. Storytelling — both oral tradition and written word — is the foundation of being human. In this powerful book, Christina Baldwin, one of the visionaries who started the personal writing movement, explores the vital necessity of re-creating a sacred common grou...

The new paperback in the bestselling series of inspiring personal philosophies.This collection of This I Believe essays gathers seventy-five essayists—ranging from famous to previously unknown—completing the thought that begins the book's title. With contributors who run the gamut from cellist Yo-Yo Ma, to professional skateboarder Tony Hawk, to ordinary folks like a diner waitress, an Iraq War veteran, a farmer, a new husband, and many others, This I ...

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Reviving Ophelia, Another Country, and The Shelter of Each Other comes an inspirational book that shows how words can change the world.Words are the most powerful tools at our disposal. With them, writers have saved lives and taken them, brought justice and confounded it, started wars and ended them. Writers can change the way we think and transform our definitions of right and wrong.

In this witty guide for seekers of all ages, author Henry Alford seeks instant enlightenment through conversations with those who have lived long and lived well.Armed with recent medical evidence that supports the cliche that older people are, indeed, wiser, Alford sets off to interview people over 70--some famous (Phyllis Diller, Harold Bloom, Edward Albee), some accomplished (the world's most-quoted author, a woman who walked across the country at age 89 in suppor...

The Little Soul and the Sun is a simple and powerful story that brings children a very profound truth: there is not absolute good or bad--that underneath all that happens in the world, all that we call "good" and all that we call "bad," is love. Your child will discover a God that she or he can love, because God is love, as are all the Little Souls who are a part of God. And perhaps parents, too, will rediscover who they really are.