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American History / Native American Studies

 

The Noble Savage in the New World Garden
Notes toward a Syntactics of Place
Gaile McGregor

"Assuming [as McGregor says] that the landscape will play a key role in any colonial imagination," she begins her investigation with an examination of the conventions in terms of which the earliest settlers were accustomed to image/structure their relations with nature.

From there McGregor zeros in on the iconic figure whose attributes most saliently express/mediate/displace the problematic aspects of those relations.

Tracing its "transforms" from the Puritan captivity tale through the nineteenth-century wilderness romance all the way to contemporary science fiction, what she ends up with is at once a literary history of the Noble Savage and a comprehensive metamorphology of the American mind. Wide-ranging and deep-diving, this book suggests many reevaluations of American heroes and attitudes.

The Noble Savage in the New World Garden is part of a series of comparative semio-ethonographic studies of English-speaking post-frontier cultures. It was preceded in 1985 by The Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Landscape (University of Toronto Press).

Dr. Gaile McGregor is a cultural analyst. She has studied and taught literature, cultural history, and sociology at Carleton University, the universities of Western Ontario and Manitoba, and York University. She lives in London, Ontario, and Otter Lake, Quebec.

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The cover of McGregor's book is green, with an old woodcut of an indian, gazing at a pop-art atomic cloud.

Published 1988

LC: 87-072549 PS
366 pp.  6 x 9

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Paper $17.95 t
ISBN 978-0-87972-417-7
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