Ruin and Resilience: Southern Literature and the Environment

Ruin and Resilience: Southern Literature and the Environment
ISBN-10
0807180041
ISBN-13
9780807180044
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
216
Language
English
Published
2023-04-05
Publisher
LSU Press
Author
Daniel Spoth

Description

In Ruin and Resilience, Daniel Spoth confronts why the environmental stories told about the U.S. South curve inevitably toward distressing plotlines. Examining more than a dozen works of postbellum literature and cinema, Spoth’s analysis winds from John Muir’s walking journey across the war-torn South, through the troubling of southern environmentalism’s modernity by Faulkner and Hurston, past the accounts of its acceleration in Welty and O’Connor, and finally into the present, uncovering how the tragic econarrative is transformed by contemporary food studies, climate fiction, and speculative tales inspired by the region. Phrased as a reaction to the rising temperatures and swelling sea levels in the South, Ruin and Resilience conceptualizes an environmental, ecocritical ethos for the southern United States that takes account of its fundamentally vulnerable status and navigates the space between its reactionary politics and its ecological failures.

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