Download or read book Writing the Environment in Nineteenth Century American Literature written by Steven Petersheim and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-09-17 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Ecogothic in Nineteenth Century American Literature written by Dawn Keetley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2017. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.
Download or read book Writing the Goodlife written by Priscilla Solis Ybarra and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Western Literature Association’s 2017 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award in Western American Literary and Cultural Studies Mexican American literature brings a much-needed approach to the increasingly urgent challenges of climate change and environmental injustice. Although current environmental studies work to develop new concepts, Writing the Goodlife looks to long-established traditions of thought that have existed in Mexican American literary history for the past century and a half. During that time period, Mexican American writing consistently shifts the focus from the environmentally destructive settler values of individualism, domination, and excess toward the more beneficial refrains of community, non-possessiveness, and humility. The decolonial approaches found in these writings provide rich examples of mutually respectful relations between humans and nature, an approach that Priscilla Solis Ybarra calls “goodlife” writing. Goodlife writing has existed for at least the past century, Ybarra contends, but Chicana/o literary history’s emphasis on justice and civil rights eclipsed this tradition and hidden it from the general public’s view. Likewise, in ecocriticism, the voices of people of color most often appear in deliberations about environmental justice. The quiet power of goodlife writing certainly challenges injustice, to be sure, but it also brings to light the decolonial environmentalism heretofore obscured in both Chicana/o literary history and environmental literary studies. Ybarra’s book takes on two of today’s most discussed topics—the worsening environmental crisis and the rising Latino population in the United States—and puts them in literary-historical context from the U.S.-Mexico War up to today’s controversial policies regarding climate change, immigration, and ethnic studies. This book uncovers 150 years’ worth of Mexican American and Chicana/o knowledge and practices that inspire hope in the face of some of today’s biggest challenges.
Download or read book Nineteenth Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History written by Juliana Chow and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History illuminates how literary experimentation with natural history provides penumbral views of environmental survival. The book brings together feminist revisions of scientific objectivity and critical race theory on diaspora to show how biogeography influenced material and metaphorical concepts of species and race. It also highlights how lesser known writers of color like Simon Pokagon and James McCune Smith connected species migration and mutability to forms of racial uplift. The book situates these literary visions of environmental fragility and survival amidst the development of Darwinian theories of evolution and against a westward expanding American settler colonialism.
Download or read book Converging Stories written by Jeffrey Myers and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that in US literature, discourse on the themes of race and ecology is too narrowly focused on the twentieth century and does not adequately take into account how these themes are interrelated. This study broadens the field by looking at writings from the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Fallen Forests written by Karen L. Kilcup and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1844, Lydia Sigourney asserted, "Man's warfare on the trees is terrible." Like Sigourney many American women of her day engaged with such issues as sustainability, resource wars, globalization, voluntary simplicity, Christian ecology, and environmental justice. Illuminating the foundations for contemporary women's environmental writing, Fallen Forests shows how their nineteenth-century predecessors marshaled powerful affective, ethical, and spiritual resources to chastise, educate, and motivate readers to engage in positive social change. Fallen Forests contributes to scholarship in American women's writing, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and feminist rhetoric, expanding the literary, historical, and theoretical grounds for some of today's most pressing environmental debates. Karen L. Kilcup rejects prior critical emphases on sentimentalism to show how women writers have drawn on their literary emotional intelligence to raise readers' consciousness about social and environmental issues. She also critiques ecocriticism's idealizing tendency, which has elided women's complicity in agendas that depart from today's environmental orthodoxies. Unlike previous ecocritical works, Fallen Forests includes marginalized texts by African American, Native American, Mexican American, working-class, and non-Protestant women. Kilcup also enlarges ecocriticism's genre foundations, showing how Cherokee oratory, travel writing, slave narrative, diary, polemic, sketches, novels, poetry, and expos intervene in important environmental debates.
Download or read book Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth Century American Life written by Brian C. Black and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-04-30 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth-century saw a significant transformation in the United States. In one short century, the nation had seen the populating of the Great Plains and West, the decimation of native Indian tribes, the growth of national transportation and communication networks, and the rise of major cities. The century also witnessed the destruction of the nation's forests, battles over land and water, and the ascent of agribusiness. With these changes in resource use patterns and values came a concordant shift in attitudes toward nature. Conservation and preservation emerged as watchwords for the 1900s. The century that started with an attitude of environmental conquest thus ended by embracing conservation and a new environmental awareness.
Download or read book Gendered Ecologies written by Dewey W. Hall and published by . This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century considers the value of interrelationships that exist among human, nonhuman species, and inanimate objects as part of the environment, and features observations by women writers as recorded in nature diaries, poetry, bildungsroman, sensational fiction, philosophical fiction, and folklore. In addition, the edition aims to present a case for transnational women writers who have been involved in participating in the discourse of natural philosophy from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. The collection engages with current paradigms of thought influencing the field of ecocriticism and, more specifically, ecofeminism. Various theories are featured, informing interpretation of literary and non-literary material, which include Anthropocene feminism, feminist geography, neo-materialism, object-oriented ontology, panarchy, and trans-corporeality. In particular, neo-materialism and trans-corporeality are guiding principles of the collection, providing theoretical coherence. Neo-materialism becomes a means by which to examine literary and non-literary content by women writers with attention to the materiality of objects as the aim of inquiry. Regarding trans-corporeality, contributors provide evidence of the interrelations between the body-as-matter and animate beings along with inanimate entities. Together, neo-materialism and trans-corporeality drive the edition, as contributors contemplate the significance of interactions among human, nonhuman, organic, and inanimate objects.
Download or read book A Companion to American Literature written by Susan Belasco and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-04-03 with total page 1864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth Century American Literature written by Russ Castronovo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-02 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature will offer a cutting-edge assessment of the period's literature, offering readers practical insights and proactive strategies for exploring novels, poems, and other literary creations.
Download or read book Sites Unseen written by William A. Gleason and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sites Unseen examines the complex intertwining of race and architecture in nineteenth and early-twentieth century American culture, the period not only in which American architecture came of age professionally in the U.S. but also in which ideas about architecture became a prominent part of broader conversations about American culture, history, politics, andOCoalthough we have not yet understood this clearlyOCorace relations. This rich and copiously illustrated interdisciplinary study explores the ways that American writing between roughly 1850 and 1930 concerned itself, often intensely, with the racial implications of architectural space primarily, but not exclusively, through domestic architecture. In addition to identifying an archive of provocative primary materials, Sites Unseen draws significantly on important recent scholarship in multiple fields ranging from literature, history, and material culture to architecture, cultural geography, and urban planning. Together the chapters interrogate a variety of expressive American vernacular forms, including the dialect tale, the novel of empire, letters, and pulp stories, along with the plantation cabin, the West Indian cottage, the Latin American plaza, and the OC OrientalOCO parlor. These are some of the overlooked plots and structures that can and should inform a more comprehensive consideration of the literary and cultural meanings of American architecture. Making sense of the relations between architecture, race, and American writing of the long nineteenth centuryOCoin their regional, national, and hemispheric contextsOCo Sites Unseen provides a clearer view not only of this catalytic era but also more broadly of what architectural historian Dell Upton has aptly termed the social experience of the built environment."
Download or read book Teaching with Digital Humanities written by Jennifer Travis and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jennifer Travis and Jessica DeSpain present a long-overdue collection of theoretical perspectives and case studies aimed at teaching nineteenth-century American literature using digital humanities tools and methods. Scholars foundational to the development of digital humanities join educators who have made digital methods central to their practices. Together they discuss and illustrate how digital pedagogies deepen student learning. The collection's innovative approach allows the works to be read in any order. Dividing the essays into five sections, Travis and DeSpain curate conversations on the value of project-based, collaborative learning; examples of real-world assignments where students combine close, collaborative, and computational reading; how digital humanities aids in the consideration of marginal texts; the ways in which an ethics of care can help students organize artifacts; and how an activist approach affects debates central to the study of difference in the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of the Environment in American Literature written by Geoff Hamilton and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This encyclopedia introduces readers to American poetry, fiction and nonfiction with a focus on the environment (broadly defined as humanity's natural surroundings), from the discovery of America through the present. The work includes biographical and literary entries on material from early explorers and colonists such as Columbus, Bartolome de Las Casas and Thomas Harriot; Native American creation myths; canonical 18th- and 19th-century works of Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Twain, Dickinson and others; to more recent figures such as Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Stanley Cavell, Rachel Carson, Jon Krakauer and Al Gore. It is meant to provide a synoptic appreciation of how the very concept of the environment has changed over the past five centuries, offering both a general introduction to the topic and a valuable resource for high school and university courses focused on environmental issues.
Download or read book Stronger Truer Bolder written by Karen L. Kilcup and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2021-05-15 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtually every famous nineteenth-century writer (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson)— and many not so famous—wrote literature for children; many contributed regularly to children’s periodicals, and many entered the field of nature writing, responding to and forwarding the century’s huge social and cultural changes. Appreciating America’s unique natural wonders dovetailed with children’s growth as citizens, but children’s journals often exceeded a pedagogical purpose, intending also to entertain and delight. Though these volumes aimed at a relatively conservative and mostly white, middle-class, and affluent audience, some selections allowed both children and their parents room for imaginative escape from restrictive social norms. Covering a period that initially regarded children’s natural bodies as laboring resources, Stronger, Truer, Bolder traces the shifting pedagogical impulse surrounding nature and the environment through the transformations that included America’s nineteenth century emergence as an industrial power. Karen L. Kilcup shows how children’s literature mirrored those changes in various ways. In its earliest incarnations, it taught children (and their parents) facts about the natural world and about proper behavior vis-à-vis both human and nonhuman others. More significantly, as periodical writing for children advanced, this literature increasingly promoted children’s environmental agency and envisioned their potential influence on concerns ranging from animal rights and interspecies equity to conservation and environmental justice. Such understanding of and engagement with nature not only propelled children toward ethical adulthood but also formed a foundation for responsible American citizenship.
Download or read book Passions for Nature written by Rochelle Johnson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century Americans celebrated nature through many artistic forms, including natural-history writing, landscape painting, landscape design theory, and transcendental philosophy. Although we tend to associate these movements with the nation’s dawning environmental consciousness, Passions for Nature demonstrates that they instead alienated Americans from the physical environment even as they seemed to draw people to it. Rather than see these expressions of passion for nature as initiating environmental awareness, this study reveals how they contributed to a culture that remains startlingly ignorant of the details of the material world. Using as a touchstone the writings of nineteenth-century philanthropist Susan Fenimore Cooper (the daughter of famed author James Fenimore Cooper), Passions for Nature reveals that while a generalized passion for nature was intense and widespread in her era, cultural attention to the "real" physical world was quite limited. Popular artistic forms represented the natural world through specific metaphors for the American experience, cultivating a national tradition of valuing nature in terms of humanity. Johnson crosses disciplinary boundaries to demonstrate that anthropocentric understandings of the natural world result not only from the growing gulf between science and imagination that C. P. Snow located in the early twentieth century but also--and surprisingly--from cultural productions traditionally viewed as positive engagements with the environment. By uncovering the roots of a cultural alienation from nature, Passions for Nature explains how the United States came to be a nation that simultaneously reveres the natural world and yet remains dangerously distant from it.
Download or read book Writing the Environment written by Richard Kerridge and published by . This book was released on 1998-03-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this critique of the modern world write about a range of environment-related issues and assess the impact of a variety of groups on popular culture. They see the environmental crisis as the limit of postmodernism.
Download or read book Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction written by Laura Barbas-Rhoden and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
