Abstract
John Muir forged a new language for nature in America. As he crossed the bridge from the Christian faith of his childhood to the Darwinian science of his education, Muir adapted the rich language of the King James Bible to the needs of a secular ecological conscience. He made the transition at precisely the right moment for the conservation movement, and evolved a passionate idiom with which millions of readers could feel comfortable. I discuss some of the reasons his essays and books reached into the hearts of his generation, and show why his textual strategies still serve conservation writers well. But Muir didn’t spring from a void. Later in this essay I discuss European writing traditions which provided him with issues, heroes, rhetorical models and even specific scenes for emulation. From a century’s distance, reading Muir from a different intertextual position, we can see both the richness of his influences and some habitual blind spots which his heroes passed on.
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Wallin, L. (1999). Writing “God’s Fine Wilderness”: John Muir in the Mountains of California. In: Buttimer, A., Wallin, L. (eds) Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective. The GeoJournal Library, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2392-3_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2392-3_16
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