Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture

Gatta provides rich detail about a first-year program at Sewanee called "Find Your Place," which he uses as an example of "what [it might] look like to make place-making-in its fullest intellectual, existential, and social context-a deliberate goal of higher education. Summing up: Recommended * CHOICE *
This book makes a valuable contribution to the fields of theology and literature. Perhaps most significant it reminds us that theological reflection is not solely the purview of academic theologians nor is it limited to overt theological texts' * Molly F. James, Office of the General Convention, Anglican and Episcopal History *
John Gatta's luminous book offers us a rewarding consideration of place in the finest writers in the American literary tradition—a garden of varied delights, sweet and pungent and sacred. But Gatta does not stop at analysis. He also traces a path of pilgrimage, and includes a chapter showing how education can include the work of place-making. The land has become ours; now we must learn to become the land's. * Wilfred M. McClay, G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty, University of Oklahoma *
In a time when the fate of all the places of Earth comes within the orbit of human power and influence-our Anthropocene epoch-we need scholars who can marshal literary and theological traditions for the work of imagining a future, flourishing world. Gatta is ideally positioned to lead us in this work. This book educates, delights, and inspires. It will help you rethink your place as worthy of attention, study, and care. * Norman Wirzba, Duke University *
John Gatta's new book is a thoughtful and learned exposition of the power of place and setting in American literature, by a critic and scholar at the height of his own powers. In his wonderful and reader-friendly accounts of writers with an intense imaginative focus on nature and setting, Gatta's analysis presents the multiple meanings of sacred space in American culture. I highly recommend this volume to all readers interested in the beauty and wonder evoked by great poems, stories, memoirs, and even such cultural sites as monuments, battlegrounds, and burial sites. * Harold K. Bush, author of The Hemingway Files & Continuing Bonds with the Dead: Parental Grief and Nineteenth-Century American Authors *