Nature's state : imagining Alaska as the last frontier

Resource Information

The work Nature's state : imagining Alaska as the last frontier represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Nature's state : imagining Alaska as the last frontier

Title remainder

imagining Alaska as the last frontier

Statement of responsibility

Susan Kollin

Creator

• Kollin, Susan

Subject

• Alaska -- In literature
• American literature -- Alaska -- History and criticism
• Authors, American -- Homes and haunts -- Alaska
• Environmental protection -- Alaska -- Historiography
• Frontier and pioneer life -- Alaska
• Frontier and pioneer life in literature
• Natural history -- Alaska -- Historiography
• Nature in literature
• Alaska -- Historiography

Language

eng

Summary

An engaging blend of environmental theory and literary studies, Nature's State looks behind the myth of Alaska as America's "last frontier," a pristine and wild place on the fringes of our geographical imagination. Susan Kollin traces how this seemingly marginal space in American culture has in fact functioned to alleviate larger social anxieties about nature, ethnicity, and national identity. Kollin pays special attention to the ways in which concerns for the environment not only shaped understandings of Alaska, but also aided U.S. nation-building projects in the Far North from the late nineteenth century to the present era. Beginning in 1867, the year the United States purchased Alaska, a variety of literary and cultural texts helped position the region as a crucial staging ground for territorial struggles between native peoples, Russians, Canadians, and Americans. In showing how Alaska has functioned as a contested geography in the nation's spatial imagination, Kollin addresses writings by a wide range of figures, including early naturalists John Muir and Robert Marshall, contemporary nature writers Margaret Murie, John McPhee, and Barry Lopez, adventure writers Jack London and Jon Krakauer, and native authors Nora Dauenhauer, Robert Davis, and Mary TallMountain

Member of

• Cultural studies of the United States

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

810.9/32798

Government publication

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

Illustrations

• illustrations
• maps

Index

index present

LC call number

PS283.A4

LC item number

K65 2001

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Cultural studies of the United States