Introduction
The question of how space becomes place, through human experience and imagination, has for some time occupied scholars of diverse disciplines. This book pursues the further religious question of how places have acquired hallowed or spirit-bearing meaning throughout the course of American literary history—not only in Christian or semipantheistic terms but as outgrowths of the ancient Roman principle of a site’s genius loci. After an opening chapter devoted to representations of home places, commentary proceeds to a chapter devoted to resettlement and pilgrimage themes; then to an inquiry about imagination in place; then to a literary-steeped sampling of diverse American sites and landforms; and finally to a consideration of how place-making and site-based learning might figure in collegiate educational programs. Along the way, this book’s spirit-of-place readings range across texts by canonical figures such as Thoreau, Stowe, Cather, and Wendell Berry as well as an array of lesser-known writers.