"Coyote at Large shatters the misconception that nature writing - works that seem limited to expressing conventional awe, reverence, piety, and wonder - is a humorless genre. In this important and engaging study, Edward Abbey, Louise Erdrich, Wendell Berry, and Rachel Carson, whom the author dubs "comic moralists," command center stage. The trickster-coyote of Native American mythology appears in playful interludes, roaming at large through the prose and poetry of Simon Ortiz, Ursula Le Guin, Sally Carrighar, and Gary Snyder, providing a recurring analog for how comedy and humor show themselves in traditional and contemporary American nature writing."--Jacket.
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