In the continental United States, rivers serve to connect state to
state, interior with exterior, the past to the present, but they also
divide places and peoples from one another. These connections and
divisions have given rise to a diverse body of literature that explores
American nature, ranging from travel accounts of seventeenth-century
Puritan colonists to magazine articles by twenty-first-century
enthusiasts of extreme sports. Using pivotal American writings to
determine both what literature can tell us about rivers and, conversely,
how rivers help us think about the nature of literature, "The Meaning of
Rivers "introduces readers to the rich world of flowing water and some
of the different ways in which American writers have used rivers to
understand the world through which these waters flow."" Embracing a
hybrid, essayistic form part literary theory, part cultural history, and
part fieldwork "The Meaning of Rivers" connects the humanities to other
disciplines and scholarly work to the land. Whether developing a theory
of palindromes or reading works of American literature as varied as
Henry David Thoreau's "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" and
James Dickey s "Deliverance," McMillin urges readers toward a
transcendental retracing of their own interpretive encounters. The
nature of texts and the nature of nature require diverse and versatile
interpretation; interpretation requires not only depth and concentration
but also imaginative thinking, broad-mindedness, and engaged
connection-making. By taking us upstream as well as down, McMillin draws
attention to the potential of rivers for improving our sense of place
and time.
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