"Iconic as a novelist and popular cultural figure, Zora Neale Hurston remains underappreciated as an anthropologist. Is it inevitable that Hurston's literary authority should eclipse her anthropological authority? If not, what sociocultural and institutional values and processes shape the different ways we read her work? Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall considers the polar receptions to two of Hurston's areas of achievement by examining the critical response...

"The Metamorphosis of Plants, originally published in 1790, was Goethe's first major attempt to describe what he called in a letter to a friend "the truth about the how of the organism." Inspired by the diversity of flora he found on a journey to Italy, Goethe sought a unity of form in diverse structures. He came to see in the leaf the germ of a plant's metamorphosis - "the true Proteus who can hide or reveal himself in all vegetal forms" - from the...

John Steinbeck, intellectual soulmate of pioneering ecologist Edward F. Ricketts, developed a literary vision unique for its biological holism. From his exploration of the environmental disaster in the Dust Bowl region described in The Grapes of Wrath to his voyage of scientific and spiritual discovery among near-pristine marine ecosystems recounted in Log from the Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck's entire canon probes the multiple and interlocked dimensions...