Beyond the Fruited Plain

Beyond the Fruited Plain PDF Author: Kathryn Cornell Dolan
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803269439
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Agriculture in the United States has changed dramatically in the last two hundred years. Economic transformation marked by the expansion of the industrial economy and big business has contributed to an increase in industrial food production. Amid this change, policymakers and cultural critics have debated the best way to produce food and wealth for an expanding population with imperialistic tendencies. In a sweeping overview, Beyond the Fruited Plain traces the connections between nineteenth-century literature, agriculture, and U.S. territorial and economic expansion. Bringing together theories of globalization and ecocriticism, Kathryn Cornell Dolan offers new readings on the texts of such literary figures as Herman Melville, Frank Norris, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, and Harriet Beecher Stowe as they examine conflicts of food, labor, class, race, gender, and time—issues still influencing U.S. food politics today. Beyond the Fruited Plain shows how these authors use their literature to imagine agricultural alternatives to national practices and in so doing prefigure twenty-first-century concerns about globalization, resource depletion, food security, and the relation of industrial agriculture to pollution, disease, and climate change.

Beyond the Fruited Plain

Beyond the Fruited Plain PDF Author: Kathryn Cornell Dolan
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803269439
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book Here

Book Description
Agriculture in the United States has changed dramatically in the last two hundred years. Economic transformation marked by the expansion of the industrial economy and big business has contributed to an increase in industrial food production. Amid this change, policymakers and cultural critics have debated the best way to produce food and wealth for an expanding population with imperialistic tendencies. In a sweeping overview, Beyond the Fruited Plain traces the connections between nineteenth-century literature, agriculture, and U.S. territorial and economic expansion. Bringing together theories of globalization and ecocriticism, Kathryn Cornell Dolan offers new readings on the texts of such literary figures as Herman Melville, Frank Norris, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, and Harriet Beecher Stowe as they examine conflicts of food, labor, class, race, gender, and time—issues still influencing U.S. food politics today. Beyond the Fruited Plain shows how these authors use their literature to imagine agricultural alternatives to national practices and in so doing prefigure twenty-first-century concerns about globalization, resource depletion, food security, and the relation of industrial agriculture to pollution, disease, and climate change.

The Fruited Plain

The Fruited Plain PDF Author: Walter Ebeling
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520037519
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Details the history of agriculture in America's seven geographical regions, analyzing the environmental problems that began when the Indians' "shifting" agriculture was replaced by the white man's "permanent" agriculture

International Who's Who in Poetry 2004

International Who's Who in Poetry 2004 PDF Author: Europa Publications
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9781857431780
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
Provides up-to-date profiles on the careers of leading and emerging poets.

Cattle Country

Cattle Country PDF Author: Kathryn Cornell Dolan
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496227018
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
As beef and cattle production progressed in nineteenth-century America, the cow emerged as the nation’s representative food animal and earned a culturally prominent role in the literature of the day. In Cattle Country Kathryn Cornell Dolan examines the role cattle played in narratives throughout the century to show how the struggles within U.S. food culture mapped onto society’s broader struggles with colonization, environmentalism, U.S. identity, ethnicity, and industrialization. Dolan examines diverse texts from Native American, African American, Mexican American, and white authors that showcase the zeitgeist of anxiety surrounding U.S. identity as cattle gradually became an industrialized food source, altering the country’s culture while exacting a high cost to humans, animals, and the land. From Henry David Thoreau’s descriptions of indigenous cuisines as a challenge to the rising monoculture, to Washington Irving’s travel narratives that foreshadow cattle replacing American bison in the West, to María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s use of cattle to connect race and imperialism in her work, authors’ preoccupations with cattle underscored their concern for resource depletion, habitat destruction, and the wasteful overproduction of a single breed of livestock. Cattle Country offers a window into the ways authors worked to negotiate the consequences of the development of this food culture and, by excavating the history of U.S. settler colonialism through the figure of cattle, sheds new ecocritical light on nineteenth-century literature.

Wall Street and the Fruited Plain

Wall Street and the Fruited Plain PDF Author: James T. Wall
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780761841241
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
Wall Street and the Fruited Plain delves deep into the parody known today as the "Gilded Age". The last decades of the 19th century saw both industrial and agricultural explosions in the United States. However, the base metal beneath this glittering façade was comprised of sweat-soaked, underpaid laborers, many of whom had just splashed ashore from Europe's seething cauldrons. In the early years of the period, the nation underwent the wrenching challenge of Reconstruction, nominally resolved in the compromise of 1877. In the Gilded Age, America expanded both internally and externally. The frontier moved from Kansas to California. Trappers, miners, cattlemen, and--finally-homesteaders, with the help of a burgeoning railroad network, fanned out across the central plains and the western plateaus. Wall Street dominated not only the economic and social life of the country, but the politics as well. A series of lackluster presidents between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt facilitated this dominion and by the end of Roosevelt's first Administration, America had become an adolescent headliner on the world stage.

Gods and Pawns

Gods and Pawns PDF Author: Kage Baker
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780765315533
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
A collection of seven short stories set in the universe of the Company chronicles the history and adventures of the organization and its operatives, including Mendoza, Lewis, and Joseph.

Olympus and Beyond

Olympus and Beyond PDF Author: Allan Lawrence
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing
ISBN: 1480910015
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Olympus and Beyond by Allan Lawrence is the story of sport (running) told against the backdrop of the bigger human story of atmosphere, emotions, and relationships from the beginning, where a young Australian boy watched a newsreel and saw an American Naval Ensign become the first human in history to exceed 15' in the pole vault in Madison Square Garden. He vowed that one day he would compete in Madison Square Garden and break a world record. True to his word, seventeen years later, almost to the day, he succeeds, although in a different event. This is the fascinating tale of a young boy's rise in the athletic field and his coming to the United States, where he won several NCAA titles (both individual and team), and won All-American selection ten times, while winning AAU titles in cross-country, indoor, and track running. He struggled along the way with citizenship and health issues, but his determination and persistence allowed him to overcome these obstacles. Allan Lawrence is a true competitor.

The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature

The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Ethan Mannon
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1666944076
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature: The Satisfactions of Soil and Sweat explores environmental writing that foregrounds labor. Ethan Mannon argues that Virgil’s Georgics, as well as the georgic mode in general, exerted considerable influence upon some of America’s best-known writers—including Robert Frost, Willa Cather, and Wendell Berry—and that these and others worked to revise the mode to better fit their own contexts. This book also outlines the contemporary value of the georgic literary tradition—two thousand years of writing that begins with the premise that humans must use the world in order to survive and search for a balance between human needs and nature’s productive capacity. In the georgic mode, authors found an adaptable discourse that enabled them to advocate for the protection and responsible use of productive lands, present rural places and people in all of their complexity, explore human relationships with laboring animals, and advertise the sensory pleasures of rooted work.

Melville's Democracy

Melville's Democracy PDF Author: Jennifer Greiman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503634329
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
For Herman Melville, the instability of democracy held tremendous creative potential. Examining the centrality of political thought to Melville's oeuvre, Jennifer Greiman argues that Melville's densely figurative aesthetics give form to a radical reimagining of democratic foundations, relations, and ways of being—modeling how we can think democracy in political theory today. Across Melville's five decades of writing, from his early Pacific novels to his late poetry, Greiman identifies a literary formalism that is radically political and carries the project of democratic theory in new directions. Recovering Melville's readings in political philosophy and aesthetics, Greiman shows how he engaged with key problems in political theory—the paradox of foundations, the vicious circles of sovereign power, the fragility of the people—to produce a body of radical democratic art and thought. Scenes of green and growing life, circular structures, and images of a groundless world emerge as forms for understanding democracy as a collective project in flux. In Melville's experimental aesthetics, Greiman finds a significant precursor to the tradition of radical democratic theory in the US and France that emphasizes transience and creativity over the foundations and forms prized by liberalism. Such politics, she argues, are necessarily aesthetic: attuned to material and sensible distinctions, open to new forces of creativity.

Dining with Madmen

Dining with Madmen PDF Author: Thomas Fahy
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496821556
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
In Dining with Madmen: Fat, Food, and the Environment in 1980s Horror, author Thomas Fahy explores America’s preoccupation with body weight, processed foods, and pollution through the lens of horror. Conspicuous consumption may have communicated success in the eighties, but only if it did not become visible on the body. American society had come to view fatness as a horrifying transformation—it exposed the potential harm of junk food, gave life to the promises of workout and diet culture, and represented the country’s worst consumer impulses, inviting questions about the personal and environmental consequences of excess. While changing into a vampire or a zombie often represented widespread fears about addiction and overeating, it also played into concerns about pollution. Ozone depletion, acid rain, and toxic waste already demonstrated the irrevocable harm being done to the planet. The horror genre—from A Nightmare on Elm Street to American Psycho—responded by presenting this damage as an urgent problem, and, through the sudden violence of killers, vampires, and zombies, it depicted the consequences of inaction as terrifying. Whether through Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, a vampire’s thirst for blood in The Queen of the Damned and The Lost Boys, or an overwhelming number of zombies in George Romero’s Day of the Dead, 1980s horror uses out-of-control hunger to capture deep-seated concerns about the physical and material consequences of unchecked consumption. Its presentation of American appetites resonated powerfully for audiences preoccupied with body size, food choices, and pollution. And its use of bodily change, alongside the bloodlust of killers and the desolate landscapes of apocalyptic fiction, demanded a recognition of the potentially horrifying impact of consumerism on nature, society, and the self.