Ever since the Long Expedition labeled the plains west of the Mississippi the “Great American Desert, ” Americans have grappled with the radical differences between the humid East and the arid West.
Wild, Weird, West: Essays on Arid America collects a diverse array of essays that weave together an image of this indelible region.
Author Gary Reger’s aim is to examine human interaction with desert spaces of the American Southwest through specific case studies that range from treatment of literary texts, sacred spaces, travelers’ narratives, colonial topography, UFO encounters, and even the desert of Mars.
Trained in Greek and Roman history, Reger brings a unique approach to theorizing desert spaces, which sifts together the sands of ecocriticism, materialism, and historical approaches. He argues that the southwestern desert imaginary orbits a series of tropes that echo across subject and across theoretical approach.
In sum, Wild, Weird, West provides a transdisciplinary vision of desert literature, tracing the agency of the landscape itself and the human beings who have encountered it.
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Gary Reger’s work has focused on two arenas: the economy of the Greek and Roman world and the history of human interaction with deserts. He has published widely in both fields, and he has served as the epigrapher for an excavation in Turkey. Reger has been a Hyde Fellow in the Classics Department at the University of Pennsylvania, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and in 2023 undertook a Fulbright Fellowship to study deserts at the University of Western Australia. Now retired from his professorship at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, he currently lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
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