In a world that is increasingly reliant on science, technology, and
virtual relationships, our reciprocal and intimate connection to
place has often been overlooked. This concern is now at the
forefront of debate among environmental planners and designers, who
are asking: What is distinctive and memorable about a certain
place? Who lives there - or once did? What are the impacts of
metropolitan growth, sprawl, and the loss of family farms? In
""Literature of Place"", Melanie Simo looks beyond crowded malls
and boarded-up storefronts on Main Street to our collective memory,
finding answers to these questions in stories, novels, memoirs,
poetry, essays, diaries, travel writing, and nature writing that
range in origin from New England and the Southern Highlands to
Hawaii and in subject from little gardens to lost or reinhabited
places in cities, mill towns, deserts, and woodlands. In her
consideration of selected American works from 1890 to 1970 - years
that mark the closing of the Western frontier and later openings in
space exploration, environmental protection, genetic engineering,
and cyberspace - Simo uncovers a literature of place and the
often-surprising relationship of place to our daily lives. While
the exploration of outer space and cyberspace may now seem
limitless, some planners and designers are rediscovering ways of
building from an earlier time and reconsidering the importance of
place. In ""Literature of Place"" Simo furthers this movement by
retrieving some common threads of attachment to place in works by
John Steinbeck, Willa Cather, Henry James, Robert Frost, Wallace
Stegner, Henry Beston, Rachel Carson, Loren Eiseley, Wendell Berry,
J B Jason, Jane Jacobs, and others. By reconsidering works by such
diverse and often surprisingly unknown writers, Simo seeks to
broaden our understanding of place and stimulate the imagination of
those who are creating and preserving memorable places in our time.
A companion volume to ""Forest and Garden: Traces of Wilderness in
a Modernizing Land, 1897-1949"" (Virginia 2003), ""Literature of
Place"" will appeal to urban designers, architects, landscape
architects, environmental planners, literary and social historians,
and all who are concerned about the fate of places in an
increasingly ""small"" and remotely controlled world.
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