Anthony Lioi’s “In a Dark Wood” compares Eiseley’s “dark night of the soul” to Dante’s spiritual journey in the Comedia, contrasting Eiseley’s ecological redemption with Dante’s Christian redemption.

New approaches to “The Star Thrower” find an “ecology of redemption” in his persona’s quest for meaning (214–15). Breschinsky’s “From the American Great Plains to the Steppes of Russia,” concerns efforts to translate Eiseley’s work into Russian and its mixed reception in Russia.Ī number of essays explore Eiseley’s personal spirituality in terms of Emerson, Thoreau, Dante, Jung, Whitehead, and Burroughs. Perhaps the most unusual essay, Dimitri N. Kathleen Boardman’s “Anthropomorphizing the Essay” uses new insights from cognitive ethnology to refute charges of anthropocentricism in Eiseley’s thought. Pamela Gossin’s “Lessons of an Interdisciplinary Life” examines rhetorical strategies for teaching Eiseley in the interdisciplinary classroom and shows how his work can be used to model new ways of thinking and writing.

Another study, Stephen Mercier’s “Epic Narratives of Evolution,” notes the similarities between Eiseley’s and John Burroughs’s use of the tropes of the journey and the road to present the complexities of evolution in nontechnical terms. A reexamination of Eiseley’s poetry in terms of ecopoetics finds a unique expression of “evolutionary consciousness” (136–40). One of the most noteworthy essays, Jacqueline Cason’s “The Spirit of Synecdoche” examines Eiseley’s use of metaphor to depict ecological complexity in his use of the “concealed essay” form in exploring the conflict of order and chaos in evolution (187, 208). Several contributors discuss the significance of rural and urban places in shaping Eiseley’s literary cartography. The fourteen critical essays in this volume highlight the diversity of new interdisciplinary approaches to Eiseley criticism. The growing importance of Eiseley’s work reflects a new interest in science and nature writing as well as in the genre of creative nonfiction. Whatever the causes, this long overdue volume should remedy that neglect. Or it may be that given his wide range of interests, Eiseley demands a unique interdisciplinary scholarship. In their introduction, the editors lament the dearth of scholarship for a writer of Eiseley’s stature, suggesting that he might be a victim of the same “two cultures” split that he decried. These essays testify to the scope and diversity of contemporary Eiseley scholarship. Maher have assembled a wide variety of critical perspectives, ranging from ecocriticism to structural, rhetorical, thematic, and place-oriented approaches. Artifacts & Illuminations, the first comprehensive collection of new critical essays about Loren Eiseley’s work, will transform Eiseley scholarship and encourage fresh interpretations.

Loren Eiseley by Loren Eiseley