Rural Hours - Softcover

Susan Fenimore Cooper

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0820320005 ISBN 13: 9780820320007

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 1998

Synopsis

The daughter of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper uses narratives and descriptions of her walks and excursions in this piece of American nature writing, to reveal her ideal society as a rural one, carefully poised between the receding wilderness and looming industrialization.

About this title

Review:

An engagingly, astutely, sensitively, and eloquently written work by the first really significant American woman nature writer.

--Lawrence Buell "Harvard University "

Rural Hours should interest students of American geography, history, and literature as an important early work of nature writing. It is a significant literary achievement by a woman who has too long languished in the shadow of her famous father.

--Louise Westling

From the Author:

Rural Hours is a 19th-century call for balance with nature.
Rural Hours (1850) is the first book of nature writing by an American woman. Written in the form of a year's journal entries, it offers readers insights into the environmental concerns of an educated mid-nineteenth-century woman and a broad yet detailed view of the natural history of the Otsego Lake region surrounding Cooperstown, New York. While she describes her area's plant and animal life, as well as other aspects of her region, Cooper also narrates the geologic and human history of her native place. She seeks to convey the fullness of both human and nonhuman life in her region, to expose the links between human and nonhuman history, and to suggest a more sustainable approach to the environment. Page by page, the larger purposes of Cooper's book emerge: she hopes to educate Americans about their natural world, to instill in them a pride of place based on this deeper knowledge, and finally to convince them of a moral obligation to preserve their environment. Rural Hours appeared in nine editions between 1850 and 1876. The text was cut by more than 40% for an 1887 edition. The new Johnson/Patterson edition makes the full text of Rural Hours available for the first time since 1876. The edition available from the Syracuse University Press, edited by David Jones, reprints the abridged edition of 1887.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0820320005
• ISBN 13: 9780820320007
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 360
• Editor: Rochelle Johnson, J.Daniel Patterson