In her first book, "The Lay of the Land", Kolodny explores the colonization of America, both in reality and in the realm of metaphor. She examines "the continued repetition of the land-as-woman symbolization in American life and letters" (Kolodny, ix). The projection of female imagery onto the landscape was essential to its colonization, she argued; in her introduction, she asks, "was there perhaps a need to experience the land as a nurturing, giving maternal breast because of the threatening, alien, and potentially emasculating terror of the unknown?" (9) By construing the land as female, she argued, it was possible for the colonists to remove some of the terror and mystery from an unknown land. Instead, it became either a nurturing maternal figure, existing to provide sustenance, or a passive virginal figure, existing only to be dominated, sexually or otherwise. With these metaphors firmly in sight, the colonists had a framework through which to view the vast stretches of North America as less alien and terrifying. Through an examination of several male writers, such as Philip Freneau, James Fenimore Cooper, and John James Audubon, Kolodny pursues the implications of this metaphorically female land.