The Achievement of Wendell Berry
The Hard History of Love
Publication Year: 2011
Published by: The University Press of Kentucky
Front Cover
Blurbs
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents page
Acknowledgments
Download PDF (44.0 KB)
pp. vii-viii
I wish to begin by thanking Wendell Berry for the rich and honest work he has given, and continues to give, to his readers. I thank him, too, for his permission to quote more fully from the poems “Dante” and “Sabbath VII, 2008” than fair scholarly use customarily allows. I am also grateful to my editors at the University Press of Kentucky, Laura Sutton, Ann Malcolm, ...
Abbreviations
Download PDF (48.8 KB)
pp. ix-xi
Introduction
Download PDF (73.8 KB)
pp. 1-8
To attempt a work of literary criticism devoted to the writings of Wendell Berry might seem foolhardy. Afer all, Jayber Crow has warned critics off in no uncertain terms in the “Notice” posted “BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR” at the beginning of the novel bearing his name: “Persons attempting to find a ‘text’ in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting ...
Chapter 1. Practices, Particulars, and Virtues: What Mules Taught Wendell Berry
Download PDF (220.6 KB)
pp. 9-42
Wendell Berry remarks in “A Native Hill” that he was born in “the nick of time.” If he had been born only five years later, he “would have begun in a different world, and would no doubt have become a different man.” Born in 1934 in Kentucky, where the Depression and later World War II “delayed the mechanization” process, Berry became “less a child of [his] time” than ...
Chapter 2. Toward a Peaceable Economy for a Beloved Country: Berry as an Agrarian, Citizen, and Patriot
Download PDF (220.3 KB)
pp. 43-76
I want to begin this chapter with the improbable proposition that the Mad Farmer of Wendell Berry’s poetry and his character Burley Coulter have something to contribute to the salvation of political life in America. In “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Berry’s Mad Farmer urges us to “every day / do something that won’t compute”...
Chapter 3. Against the Church, For the Church: Berry and Christianity
Download PDF (251.8 KB)
pp. 77-116
Some years ago a student of mine asked in a seminar on Wendell Berry whether Berry’s ideas depended on Christianity or at least on a religious view of the world. I remember answering with considerable equivocation, first because I wanted to avoid saying anything that would encourage my non-Christian students to write off Berry’s ideas, but also because I was ...
Chapter 4. Port William's "Hard History of Love": The Short Stories
Download PDF (202.6 KB)
pp. 117-150
In the closing story of That Distant Land, Wendell Berry’s collected short fiction, fifty-four-year-old Danny Branch accompanies eighty-six-year-old Wheeler Catlett on a day trip to Louisville, where Wheeler is selling some of his calves. As Danny listens to the always voluble Wheeler, who seems to be “swaying on the edge of the world as if he might at any moment disappear,”...
Chapter 5. Remembering the Names: Andy Catlett, Nathan Coulter, A World Lost, Remembering, and The Memory of Old Jack
Download PDF (265.1 KB)
pp. 151-194
During his visit to his Catlett grandparents shortly after Christmas in 1943, nine-year-old Andy Catlett spends part of a day with the men working in the tobacco barn. Gathered there are his grandfather Marce, now aged beyond most work; Dick Watson, the family’s African American hand; the Brightleaf brothers, Jess and Rufus, tenant farmers working on shares; and...
Chapter 6. Imagining the Practice of Peace in a Century of War: A Place on Earth, Hannah Coulter, and Jayber Crow
Download PDF (238.8 KB)
pp. 195-236
A Place on Earth. Wendell Berry’s novel offers rich possibilities for meditation on its title. The novel is about a particular place, Port William, Kentucky, during a time, World War II, in which the life of that place has come under the influence—perhaps the tyranny—of places far distant on earth, unknown to those in Port William except through the thin details of...
Chapter 7. The "Art of Being Here"; The Poetry
Download PDF (187.6 KB)
pp. 237-268
Wendell Berry has repeatedly posted his poetry with signs saying, “NO EXPLAINING.” In “Stay Home,” the opening poem of A Part, he gives a turn to the well-known invitation, “You come too,” of Frost’s “The Pasture”...
Notes
Download PDF (200.6 KB)
pp. 269-302
Bibliography
Download PDF (85.5 KB)
pp. 303-312
Index
Download PDF (76.5 KB)
pp. 313-322
E-ISBN-13: 9780813130095
Print-ISBN-13: 9780813130071
Page Count: 336
Publication Year: 2011
Series Title: Culture of the Land
