Reconciling Nature

Reconciling Nature PDF Author: Robert M. Myers
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438476795
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Reveals how classic American novels embodied the tensions embedded in American views of the natural world from the Centennial until the end of the Second World War. Reconciling Nature maps the complex views of the environment that are evident in celebrated American novels written between the Centennial Celebration of 1876 and the end of the Second World War. During this period, which includes the Progressive era and the New Deal, Americans held three contradictory views of the natural world: a recognition of nature’s vulnerability to the changes brought by industrialism; a fear of the power of nature to destroy human civilization; and a desire to make nature useful. Robert M. Myers argues they reconciled these conflicting views through nature nostalgia, policing of wilderness areas, and through strategies of control borrowed from the social sciences. Myers combines environmental history with original readings of eight novels, producing fresh perspectives on Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Stephen Crane’s Maggie, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Mary Austin’s The Ford, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. While previous ecocritical works have focused on proto-environmentalism in classic works of literature, Reconciling Nature explores the ambivalence within these texts, demonstrating how they reproduce views of nature as threatened, threatening, and useful. The epilogue examines the environmental ideologies associated with the development and deployment of the first atomic bomb. “Reconciling Nature is an important contribution to ecocriticism, American literary studies, American studies, and environmental history. The book has incredible breadth and scope. In each chapter, Myers incorporates an impressive amount of historical context that always breathes new life into texts that have been discussed at length by other scholars.” — Lloyd Willis, author of Environmental Evasion: The Literary, Critical, and Cultural Politics of “Nature’s Nation”

Reading Under the Sign of Nature

Reading Under the Sign of Nature PDF Author: John Tallmadge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
In 1996 the ecocriticism reader appeared, a seminal work defining a then relatively new approach to literary criticism through the lens of environmental and nature studies. Reading Under the Sign of Nature is the first volume to demonstrate the practice of ecocriticism on a wide range of literary texts representing diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural perspectives. Twenty-two essays masterfully exhibit how a variety of ideas -- bioregionalism, feminism, Buddhism, postmodernism, and phenomenology -- can inform that practice. Included in this volume are critiques of prose and poetry by American writers that have long been in the literary and nature-writing canons, as well as interrogations of work by authors from Native American, African American, Occidental, and Far Eastern traditions. In this long-awaited anthology, a select group of scholars deftly employs the ecocritical approach on a valuable body of contemporary and traditional literature, evincing the rich possibilities for this form of inquiry without, as the editors note, "spinning off into obscurantism or idiosyncrasy".

Under a White Sky

Under a White Sky PDF Author: Elizabeth Kolbert
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0593136292
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? RECOMMENDED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA AND BILL GATES • SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, Esquire, Smithsonian Magazine, Vulture, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal • “Beautifully and insistently, Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment.”—Helen Macdonald, The New York Times That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth. One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.

Refiguring the Map of Sorrow

Refiguring the Map of Sorrow PDF Author: Mark Christopher Allister
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813920647
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Allister (English, St. Olaf College) examines works by six authors which fuse autobiography, literary nonfiction, and environmental literature into a distinct form of "grief narrative." Each of these authors "... begins in depression that shadows grief; each comes to put an end to depression, to move through mourning, by turning observations and stories of the external world into a narrative that heals." The six works featured are Sue Hubbell's A Country Year, Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge, Bill Barich's Laughing in the Hills, William Least Heat-Moons' Blue Highways, Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, and Gretel Ehrlich's The Solace of Open Spaces. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Out of the Shadow

Out of the Shadow PDF Author: Rinda West
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813926568
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
In western culture, the separation of humans from nature has contributed to a schism between the conscious reason and the unconscious dreaming psyche, or internal human "nature." Our increasing lack of intimacy with the land has led to a decreased capacity to access parts of the psyche not normally valued in a capitalist culture. In Out of the Shadow: Ecopsychology, Story, and Encounters with the Land, Rinda West uses Jung's idea of the shadow to explore how this divorce results in alienation, projection, and often breakdown. Bringing together ideas from analytical psychology, environmental thought, and literary studies, West explores a variety of literary texts--including several by contemporary American Indian writers--to show, through a sort of geography of the psyche, how alienation from nature reflects a parallel separation from the "nature" that constitutes the unconscious. Through her analysis of narratives that offer images of people confronting shadow, reconnecting with nature, and growing psychologically and ethically, West reveals that when characters enter into relationship with the natural world, they are better able to confront and reclaim shadow. By writing "from the shadows," West argues that contemporary writers are exploring ways of being human that have the potential for creating more just and honorable relationships with nature, and more sustainable communities. For ecocritics, conservation activists, scholars and students of environmental studies and American Indian studies, and ecopsychologists, Out of the Shadow offers hope for humans wishing to reconcile with themselves, with nature, and with community.

Beyond Nature Writing

Beyond Nature Writing PDF Author: Karla Armbruster
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813920146
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Together, their work signals a new direction in the field and offers refreshingly original insights into a broad spectrum of texts.

Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-oriented Literature

Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-oriented Literature PDF Author: Patrick D. Murphy
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813919065
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Murphy's wide-ranging book will no doubt serve as a watershed in the development of ecocriticism.

Magnificent Decay

Magnificent Decay PDF Author: Tom Nurmi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813945026
Category : Ecocriticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"This book examines some of Melville's less-read works in order to place him as an ecological writer"--

Reconciling Nature

Reconciling Nature PDF Author: Robert M. Myers
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438476795
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Reveals how classic American novels embodied the tensions embedded in American views of the natural world from the Centennial until the end of the Second World War. Reconciling Nature maps the complex views of the environment that are evident in celebrated American novels written between the Centennial Celebration of 1876 and the end of the Second World War. During this period, which includes the Progressive era and the New Deal, Americans held three contradictory views of the natural world: a recognition of nature’s vulnerability to the changes brought by industrialism; a fear of the power of nature to destroy human civilization; and a desire to make nature useful. Robert M. Myers argues they reconciled these conflicting views through nature nostalgia, policing of wilderness areas, and through strategies of control borrowed from the social sciences. Myers combines environmental history with original readings of eight novels, producing fresh perspectives on Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Stephen Crane’s Maggie, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Mary Austin’s The Ford, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. While previous ecocritical works have focused on proto-environmentalism in classic works of literature, Reconciling Nature explores the ambivalence within these texts, demonstrating how they reproduce views of nature as threatened, threatening, and useful. The epilogue examines the environmental ideologies associated with the development and deployment of the first atomic bomb. “Reconciling Nature is an important contribution to ecocriticism, American literary studies, American studies, and environmental history. The book has incredible breadth and scope. In each chapter, Myers incorporates an impressive amount of historical context that always breathes new life into texts that have been discussed at length by other scholars.” — Lloyd Willis, author of Environmental Evasion: The Literary, Critical, and Cultural Politics of “Nature’s Nation”

Postcolonial Environments

Postcolonial Environments PDF Author: U. Mukherjee
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230251323
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Postcolonial Environments examines the relationship between contemporary environmental crises and culture by offering a series of provocative readings of key Indian novels in English, making an original and important contribution to the emerging theories of 'green postcolonialism'.

The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs

The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs PDF Author: Tristan Gooley
Publisher: The Experiment
ISBN: 1615192417
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Turn Every Walk into a Game of Detection When writer and navigator Tristan Gooley journeys outside, he sees a natural world filled with clues. The roots of a tree indicate the sun’s direction; the Big Dipper tells the time; a passing butterfly hints at the weather; a sand dune reveals prevailing wind; the scent of cinnamon suggests altitude; a budding flower points south. To help you understand nature as he does, Gooley shares more than 850 tips for forecasting, tracking, and more, gathered from decades spent walking the landscape around his home and around the world. Whether you’re walking in the country or city, along a coastline, or by night, this is the ultimate resource on what the land, sun, moon, stars, plants, animals, and clouds can reveal—if you only know how to look!