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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Desert Literature: The Early Period, Peter Wild
Desert Literature: The Early Period, Peter Wild
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
Although not entirely free, ours is a fairly easy ride when it comes to living on deserts. Today, in order to survive, few people out in the lands of the giant cactus and the Gila monster eat grasshoppers or spend day after day hoeing beans in the punishing 110° heat. Instead, today’s residents enjoy a created world of air-conditioned homes, schools, and shopping malls. The point is that few people live in the desert anymore. They live on it. Theirs is a colonial society, imposed on the land, fed from the outside, and infused with the life-giving juice of energy …
Reading Wallace Stegner's Angle Of Repose, Russell Burrows
Reading Wallace Stegner's Angle Of Repose, Russell Burrows
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
Wallace Stegner must have felt he was gambling as he settled on Angle of Repose (1971) as the title for his most important novel—the one that would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize (1972). “Angle of repose” happens to be a bit of technical jargon from mining, and Stegner meant to extend it to marriage. This unlikely metaphor begins with the practical understanding that mine debris will tumble downhill only so far, because as a slope levels out, the rocks and the gravels and the like will start to pile up at their respective “angles of repose.” And so, …
New Formalist Poets Of The American West, April Linder
New Formalist Poets Of The American West, April Linder
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
In the late 1970s and early eighties, when most American poets were writing autobiographical free-verse lyrics, a handful of mavericks flouted literary fashion. They used rhyme, meter, and regular form—both traditional and innovative—and tried narrative, satire, and light verse. In an essay entitled “Can Poetry Matter?” (1991) one of these poets, Dana Gioia, accused contemporary poets of writing mostly for each other. “The poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon,” he wrote. “Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, …
Gretel Ehrlich, Gregory L. Morris
Gretel Ehrlich, Gregory L. Morris
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
As a Western writer, Gretel Ehrlich is something of a curious case. By birth a Californian, Ehrlich has nevertheless shaped her identity as a Western writer by experience gathered elsewhere in the West. At the same time, while Ehrlich has lived and written extensively about her life in north-central Wyoming—and built her considerable reputation upon that work—the arc of her experience has carried her for the moment back to her native California. This movement from place to place (Ehrlich has been a writer of many places in her career) suggests a dominant tension in her life and work: that of …