Other Country
232 pages, 6 x 9
23 halftones, 10 color images (spread over 2 4-pag
Hardcover
Release Date:03 Dec 2015
ISBN:9780816500550
GO TO CART

Other Country

Barry Lopez and the Community of Artists

The University of Arizona Press
The award-winning American environmental writer Barry Lopez has traveled extensively in remote and populated parts of the world. Lopez’s fiction and nonfiction focus on the relationship between the physical landscape and human culture, posing abiding questions about ethics, intimacy, and place.

Other Country presents a full-scale treatment of Lopez’s work. James Perrin Warren examines the relationship between Lopez’s writing and the work of several contemporary artists, composers, and musicians, whose works range from landscape photography, painting, and graphic arts to earth art, ceramics, and avant-garde music. The author demonstrates Lopez’s role in creating this community of artists who have led cultural change, and shows that Lopez’s writing—and his engagement with the natural world—creates an “other country” by redefining boundaries, rediscovering a place, and renewing our perceptions of landscapes.

Warren’s critique examines manuscripts and typescripts from the 1960s to the present, interviews with Lopez conducted from 2008 to 2013, and interviews with artists. Part 1 focuses on the relationship between Lopez’s storytelling, which he calls “a conversation with the land,” and Robert Adams’s landscape photography. For both Lopez and Adams, a worthy artistic expression serves the cultural memory of a community, reminding us how to behave properly toward other people and the land. Part 2 looks at the collaborative friendship of Lopez and visual artist Alan Magee, tracking the development of Lopez’s short stories through a consideration of Magee’s career.  Part 3 moves farther afield, discussing Lopez’s relationship to Richard Long’s earth art, Richard Rowland’s ceramics, and John Luther Adams’s soundscapes.

Other Country reveals the dynamic relationships between Lopez, considered by many the most important environmental writer working in America, and the artistic community, who seek to explore the spiritual and ethical dimensions of an honorable and attentive relationship to the land and thus offer profound implications for the future of the planet.
James Perrin Warren is S. Blount Mason Jr. Professor of English at Washington and Lee University. He is the author of several books, including The Road to the Spring: Collected Poems of Mary Austin.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations for Books by Barry Lopez
Prologue: Other Country
Part I. Captured Light
1. Learning to See: Barry Lopez and Robert Adams
2. Forms of Geography: Robert Adams’s Faith in the Light
3. Leaning into the Light: Aesthetic Communities in Arctic Dreams
Part II. Fields of Correspondence
4. Going Over: Alan Magee and Desert Notes
5. Imaginary Countries: Magee, River Notes, and Winter Count
6. The Ongoing Collaboration: Magee, Field Notes, and Resistance
Part III. Opening Fields
7. Long Lines and Earth Art
8. Mapping Home Ground
9. Soundscapes and the Resonance of Place
Epilogue: Another Geography
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Find what you’re looking for...
Stay Informed

Receive the latest UBC Press news, including events, catalogues, and announcements.


Read past newsletters

Free shipping on online orders over $40

Publishers Represented
UBC Press is the Canadian agent for several international publishers. Visit our Publishers Represented page to learn more.