Coyote In The Maze: Tracking Edward Abbey in a World of Words

by Peter Quigley (Editor)

The works of Edward Abbey have been well known to general readers since the 1960’s. This volume, the first comprehensive collection of literary criticism devoted to the entire challenging corpus of Abbey’s fiction and nonfiction, couldn’t be more timely or significant.

From the perspective of his scholarly critics in Western American literature and environmental studies Ed Abbey is, in a word, problematic. As Peter Quigley, volume editor, comments, "The title of this collection refers to a number of references within Abbey’s work. The maze is a place of myriad canyons, of wonder, and a place where the desperadoes in The Monkey Wrench Gang could lose the authorities. The coyote refers to the slippery figure in Native American myth, a figure, known to Abbey, that always eluded definition and could slip out of every trap set to catch him." In this long-awaited anthology, eighteen intrepid scholars have chosen to ignore the coyote’s reputation, tracking Abbey in one masterful and illuminating essay after another through the canyons of anarchist politics, philosophy, feminist literary criticism, post-structuralism, and rhetoric, as well as nature and environmental theory and activism.

350 pages, Paperback

First published June 9, 1998

Reviews

[Quinn]

Madison gift to me. Not sure what to expect going into but synopsis appears to be that it's scientists dunking on Ed Abbey's work and covers feminist anarchist topics and more so could be cool.

[sdw · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of essays about Edward Abbey's literary production. They cover philosophy, literary criticism, and literary theory. I appreciate the range of essays and I am finding some very useful. The book seems a bit dated (unsurprisingly, its 10 years old). The "datedness" matters because the postmodern/realism split and social ecology/deep ecology divide seem central to many of the essays, even though they are no longer the hot topics in the field. Several essays seem to be more invested in celebrating Abbey's views than taking a critical eye to how they operate in his text.

Of special note is Tom Lynch's "Nativity, Domesticity, and Exile in Edward Abbey's One True Home" which compares the way Abbey finds home in the desert to escape his domestic home while contemporary Native American authors of the region tend to people the desert in their depictions. Rebecca Raglon in "Surviving Domm and Gloom: Edward Abbey's Desert comedies" highlights Abbeys distinctive use of humor across his works; Paul T. Bryant in "Edward Abbey and Gender" attempts to answer the question of whether Abbey was sexist using biography, fiction, and non-fiction. I think it would provoke interesting conversations in an undergraduate class.