Artifacts & illuminations : critical essays on Loren Eiseley / edited and with an introduction by Tom Lynch and Susan N. Maher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"The bay of broken things": the experience of loss in the work of Loren Eiseley / Susan Hanson -- "Never going to cease my wandering": Loren Eiseley and the American hobo / M. Catherine Downs -- "The places below": Mapping the invisible universe in Loren Eiseley's plains essays / Susan N. Maher -- Unearthing urban nature: Loren Eiseley's explorations of city and suburb / Michael A. Bryson -- Anthropomorphizing the essay: Loren Eiseley's representations of animals / Kathleen Boardman -- "The borders between us": Loren Eiseley's ecopoetics / Tom Lynch -- Lessons of an interdisciplinary life: Loren Eiseley's rhetoric of profundity in popular science writing and "two cultures" pedagogy / Pamela Gossin -- Artifact and idea: Loren Eiseley's poetic undermining of C.P. Snow / Mary Ellen Pitts -- The spirit of synecdoche: order and chaos contend in the metaphors of Loren Eiseley / Jacqueline Cason -- In a dark wood: Dante, Eiseley, and the ecology of redemption / Anthony Lioi -- Emerson and Eiseley: two religious visions / Jonathan Weidenbaum -- Epic narratives of evolution: John Burroughs and Loren Eiseley / Stephen Mercier -- Eiseley and Jung: structuralism's invisible pyramid / John Nizalowski -- From the American great plains to the steppes of Russia: Loren Eiseley transplanted / Dimitri N. Breschinsky.

"Loren Eiseley (1907-77) is one of the most important American nature writers of the twentieth century and an admired practitioner of creative nonfiction. A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Eiseley was a professor of anthropology and a prolific writer and poet who worked to bring an understanding of science to the general public, incorporating religion, philosophy, and science into his explorations of the human mind and the passage of time. As a writer who bridged the sciences and the humanities, Eiseley is a challenge for scholars locked into rigid disciplinary boundaries. Artifacts and Illuminations, the first full-length collection of critical essays on the writing of Eiseley, situates his work in the genres of creative nonfiction and nature writing. The contributing scholars apply a variety of critical approaches, including ecocriticism and place-oriented studies ranging across prairie, urban, and international contexts. Contributors explore such diverse topics as Eiseley's use of anthropomorphism and Jungian concepts and examine how his work was informed by synecdoche. Long overdue, this collection demonstrates Eiseley's continuing relevance as both a skilled literary craftsman and a profound thinker about the human place in the natural world."--Project Muse.