Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness

With learning that embraces not only the history but the literary evolution, the dreams, and the profound psychic cravings of Western development, with insight, elegance, and uncanny precision that his readers have come to take for granted, Turner's work addresses the underlying delusion, the tragedy, the wreckage of our age, and how it came to pass. We are all in his debt. --W. S. Merwin "It is an astonishing performance and it works--not merely because Turner writes with a grace and perception that place him with a handful of historians who can be called great literary stylists, but because he has an idea going here, a significant one. . . . [A] brilliant, demanding, and important work." --San Francisco Chronicle "This is no ordinary critique of modern civilization . . . Beyond Geography is clearly a work of brilliance and imagination, a compelling, disturbing, and uncommonly literate exploration of one of mankind's most basic dilemmas." --Atlantic Monthly First published in 1980, Beyond Geography continues to influence and impress its readers, providing a reconstruction of the spiritual history that led up to the European domination and decimation of native culture that were as rich in mythic life as the Western culture was barren. This new edition, prepared for the Columbus quincentennial, includes a new foreword by T. H. Watkins and a new preface by the author. As the public debates Columbus's legacy, it is important for us to learn of the spiritual background of European domination of the Americas, for the Europeans who conquered the Americas substituted history for myth as a way of understanding life. Frederick Turner is the author of six books, including a biography of John Muir, a personal investigation of the roots of New Orleans jazz, and a study of the making of the American literary landscape. His essays have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, American Heritage, and the Nation.