Environmental Practice and Early American Literature

Environmental Practice and Early American Literature PDF Author: Michael Ziser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107005434
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This text rethinks American literary history by focusing on the non-human, environmental agents that have shaped its development.

Environmental Practice and Early American Literature

Environmental Practice and Early American Literature PDF Author: Michael Ziser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107005434
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Get Book Here

Book Description
This text rethinks American literary history by focusing on the non-human, environmental agents that have shaped its development.

Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Steven Petersheim
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498508383
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The nineteenth-century roots of environmental writing in American literature are often mentioned in passing and sometimes studied piece by piece. Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature brings together numerous explorations of environmentally-aware writing across the genres of nineteenth-century literature. Like Lawrence Buell, the authors of this collection find Thoreau’s writing a touchstone of nineteenth-century environmental writing, particularly focusing on Thoreau’s claim that humans may function as “scribes of nature.” However, these studies of Thoreau’s antecedents, contemporaries, and successors also reveal a range of other writers in the nineteenth century whose literary treatments of nature are often more environmentally attuned than most readers have noticed. The writers whose works are studied in this collection include canonical and forgotten writers, men and women, early nineteenth-century and late nineteenth-century authors, pioneers and conservationists. They drew attention to the conflicted relationships between humans and the American continent, as experienced by Native Americans and European Americans. Taken together, these essays offer a fresh perspective on the roots of environmental literature in nineteenth-century American nonfiction, fiction, and poetry as well as in multi-genre compositions such as the travel writings of Margaret Fuller. Bringing largely forgotten voices such as John Godman alongside canonical voices such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, the authors whose writings are studied in this collection produced a diverse tapestry of nascent American environmental writing in the nineteenth-century. From early nineteenth-century writers such as poet Philip Freneau and novelist Charles Brockden Brown to later nineteenth-century conservationists such as John James Audubon and John Muir, Scribes of Nature shows the development of an environmental consciousness and a growing conservationist ethos in American literature. Given their often surprisingly healthy respect for the natural environment, these nineteenth-century writers offer us much to consider in an age of environmental crisis. The complexities of the supposed nature/culture divide still work into our lives today as economic and environmental issues are often seen at loggerheads when they ought to be seen as part of the same conversation of what it means to live healthy lives, and to pass on a healthy world to those who follow us in a world where human activity is becoming increasingly threatening to the health of our planet.

Environmental Practice and Early American Literature

Environmental Practice and Early American Literature PDF Author: Michael Ziser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107244471
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This original and provocative study tells the story of American literary history from the perspective of its environmental context. Weaving together close readings of early American texts with ecological histories of tobacco, potatoes, apples and honey bees, Michael Ziser presents a method for literary criticism that explodes the conceptual distinction between the civilized and natural world. Beginning with the English exploration of Virginia in the sixteenth century, Ziser argues that the settlement of the 'New World' - and the cultivation and exploitation of its bounty - dramatically altered how writers used language to describe the phenomena they encountered on the frontier. Examining the work of Harriot, Grainger, Cooper, Thoreau and others, Ziser reveals how these authors, whether consciously or not, transcribed the vibrant ecology of North America, and the ways that the environment helped codify a uniquely American literary aesthetic of lasting importance.

Toward a Literary Ecology

Toward a Literary Ecology PDF Author: Karen E. Waldron
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810891980
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Scholarship of literature and the environment demonstrates myriad understandings of nature and culture. While some work in the field results in approaches that belong in the realm of cultural studies, other scholars have expanded the boundaries of ecocriticism to connect the practice more explicitly to disciplines such as the biological sciences, human geography, or philosophy. Even so, the field of ecocriticism has yet to clearly articulate its interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary nature. In Toward a Literary Ecology: Places and Spaces in American Literature,editors Karen E. Waldron and Robert Friedman have assembled a collection of essays that study the interconnections between literature and the environment to theorize literary ecology. The disciplinary perspectives in these essays allow readers to comprehend places and environments and to represent, express, or strive for that comprehension through literature. Contributors to this volume explore the works of several authors, including Gary Snyder, Karen Tei Yamashita, Rachel Carson, Terry Tempest Williams, Chip Ward, and Mary Oliver. Other essays discuss such topics as urban fiction as a model of literary ecology, the geographies of belonging in the work of Native American poets, and the literary ecology of place in “new” nature writing. Investigating texts for the complex interconnections they represent, Toward a Literary Ecology suggests what such texts might teach us about the interconnections of our own world. This volume also offers a means of analyzing representations of people in places within the realm of an historical, cultural, and geographically bounded yet diverse American literature. Intended for students of literature and ecology, this collection will also appeal to scholars of geography, cultural studies, philosophy, biology, history, anthropology, and other related disciplines.

Slow Violence in Contemporary American Environmental Literature

Slow Violence in Contemporary American Environmental Literature PDF Author: Erden El
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527563901
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
It has been approximately nine years since Rob Nixon coined the term ‘slow violence’ to express the slow but deadly changes in the environment which cause the suffering of the poor. These environmental catastrophes take place so gradually and out of sight that they are often ignored. While Nixon dealt with the issues of slow violence in the Global South, this book argues that slow violence is not limited to this region, showing that poorer parts of America suffer from slow violence. Concentrating on Illinois and the Appalachian region, it reveals how slow violence occurs in these places and discusses the reflections of slow violence in various novels set in these locations.

A Companion to American Literature

A Companion to American Literature PDF Author: Susan Belasco
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119653355
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1859

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Book Description
A comprehensive, chronological overview of American literature in three scholarly and authoritative volumes A Companion to American Literature traces the history and development of American literature from its early origins in Native American oral tradition to 21st century digital literature. This comprehensive three-volume set brings together contributions from a diverse international team of accomplished young scholars and established figures in the field. Contributors explore a broad range of topics in historical, cultural, political, geographic, and technological contexts, engaging the work of both well-known and non-canonical writers of every period. Volume One is an inclusive and geographically expansive examination of early American literature, applying a range of cultural and historical approaches and theoretical models to a dramatically expanded canon of texts. Volume Two covers American literature between 1820 and 1914, focusing on the development of print culture and the literary marketplace, the emergence of various literary movements, and the impact of social and historical events on writers and writings of the period. Spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries, Volume Three studies traditional areas of American literature as well as the literature from previously marginalized groups and contemporary writers often overlooked by scholars. This inclusive and comprehensive study of American literature: Examines the influences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and disability on American literature Discusses the role of technology in book production and circulation, the rise of literacy, and changing reading practices and literary forms Explores a wide range of writings in multiple genres, including novels, short stories, dramas, and a variety of poetic forms, as well as autobiographies, essays, lectures, diaries, journals, letters, sermons, histories, and graphic narratives. Provides a thematic index that groups chapters by contexts and illustrates their links across different traditional chronological boundaries A Companion to American Literature is a valuable resource for students coming to the subject for the first time or preparing for field examinations, instructors in American literature courses, and scholars with more specialized interests in specific authors, genres, movements, or periods.

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (LOA #182)

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (LOA #182) PDF Author: Bill McKibben
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1598530208
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
As America and the world grapple with the consequences of global environmental change, writer and activist Bill McKibben offers this unprecedented, provocative, and timely anthology, gathering the best and most significant American environmental writing from the last two centuries. Classics of the environmental imagination, the essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson's Silent Spring - are set against the inspiring story of an emerging activist movement, as revealed by newly uncovered reports of pioneering campaigns for conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches. Here are some of America's greatest and most impassioned writers, taking a turn toward nature and recognizing the fragility of our situation on earth and the urgency of the search for a sustainable way of life. Thought-provoking essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of nature, join ecologists - memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species. The anthology includes a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history, as well as an 80-page color portfolio of illustrations.

The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature

The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature PDF Author: Kevin J. Hayes
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 019518727X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 653

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Book Description
Organized primarily in terms of genre, this handbook includes original research on key concepts, as well as analysis of interesting texts from throughout colonial America. Separate chapters are devoted to literary genres of great importance at the time of their composition that have been neglected in recent decades.

Georgic Literature and the Environment

Georgic Literature and the Environment PDF Author: Sue Edney
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000779181
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This expansive edited collection explores in depth the georgic genre and its connections to the natural world. Together, its chapters demonstrate that georgic—a genre based primarily on two classical poems about farming, Virgil’s Georgics and Hesiod’s Works and Days—has been reworked by writers throughout modern and early modern English-language literary history as a way of thinking about humans’ relationships with the environment. The book is divided into three sections: Defining Georgic, Managing Nature and Eco-Georgic for the Anthropocene. It centres the georgic genre in the ecocritical conversation, giving it equal prominence with pastoral, elegy and lyric as an example of ‘nature writing’ that can speak to urgent environmental questions throughout literary history and up to the present day. It provides an overview of the myriad ways georgic has been reworked in order to address human relationships with the environment, through focused case studies on individual texts and authors, including James Grainger, William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, Judith Wright and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. This is a much-needed volume for literary critics, academics and students engaged in ecocritical studies, environmental humanities and literature, addressing a significantly overlooked environmental literary genre.

Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos

Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos PDF Author: Owen Clayton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009348078
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
The most enduring version of the hobo that has come down from the so-called 'Golden Age of Tramping' (1890s to 1940s) is an American cultural icon, signifying freedom from restraint and rebellion to the established order while reinforcing conservative messages about American exceptionalism, individualism, race, and gender. Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos shows that this 'pioneer hobo' image is a misrepresentation by looking at works created by transient artists and thinkers, including travel literature, fiction, memoir, early feminist writing, poetry, sociology, political journalism, satire, and music. This book explores the diversity of meanings that accrue around 'the hobo' and 'the tramp'. It is the first analysis to frame transiency within a nineteenth-century literary tradition of the vagabond, a figure who attempts to travel without money. This book provide new ways for scholars to think about the activity and representation of US transiency.