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The Best and Worst Country in the World - (Under the Sign of Nature) by Stephen Adams (Paperback)
About this item
Highlights
- From its earliest days, the Virginia landscape has elicited dramatically contradictory descriptions.
- About the Author: Stephen Adams is Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and the coauthor of Revising Mythologies: The Composition of Thoreau's Major Works (Virginia).
- 305 Pages
- History, United States
- Series Name: Under the Sign of Nature
Description
About the Book
A blend of history, literature, geology, geography, and natural history, enriched by illustrations ranging from a dinosaur footprint to John Smith's famous Map of Virginia, Adams's work offers an ecocritical exploration of the varied preconceptions that have shaped and colored the human relationship with the best and worst country in the world--the early Virginia landscape., reviewing a previous edition or volume
Book Synopsis
From its earliest days, the Virginia landscape has elicited dramatically contradictory descriptions. The sixteenth-century poet Michael Drayton exalted the land as "earth's onely paradise," while John Smith, in his reports to England, summarized the area around Jamestown as "a miserie, a ruine, a death, a hell."
Drawing upon both familiar history and lesser-known material from deep geological time through the end of the seventeenth century, Stephen Adams focuses on both the physical changes to the land over time and the changes in the way people viewed Virginia. The Best and Worst Country in the World reaches well beyond previous accounts of early American views of the land with the inclusion of fascinating and important pre-1700 sources, Native American perceptions, and prehuman geography and geology.
A blend of history, literature, geology, geography, and natural history, enriched by illustrations ranging from a dinosaur footprint to John Smith's famous "Map of Virginia," Adams's work offers an ecocritical exploration of the varied preconceptions that have shaped and colored the human relationship with "the best and worst country in the world"--the early Virginia landscape.
About the Author
Stephen Adams is Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and the coauthor of Revising Mythologies: The Composition of Thoreau's Major Works (Virginia).