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In Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens, Louise Westling explores how the complex, difficult roles of women in southern culture shaped the literary worlds of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor. Tracing the cultural heritage of the South, Westling shows how southern women reacted to the violent, false world created by their men--a world in which women came to be shrouded as icons of purity in atonement for the sins of men. Exposing the actual conditions of women's lives, creating assertive protagonists who resist or revise conventional roles, and exploring rich matriarchal traditions and connections to symbolic landscapes Welty, McCullers, and O'Connor created a body of fiction that enriches and complements the patriarchal version of southern life presented in the works of William Faulkner, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and William Styron.
In searching American literary landscapes for what they can reveal about our attitudes toward nature and gender, The Green Breast of the New World considers symbolic landscapes in twentieth-century American fiction, the characters who inhabit those landscapes, and the gendered traditions that can influence the figuration of both of these fictional elements. In this century, says Louise H. Westling, American literary responses to landscape and nature have been characterized by a puzzling mix of eroticism and misogyny, celebration and mourning, and reverence and disregard. Focusing on problems of gender conflict and imperialist nostalgia, The Green Breast of the New World addresses this ambiva...
Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism is a collection of new work which examines the intersection between philosophy, literature, visual art, film and the environment at a time of environmental crisis. This book is unusual in the way in which the 'imaginative', 'creative', element is privileged, notwithstanding the creativity of rigorous cultural criticism. Genuinely interdisciplinary, this book aims to be inclusive in its discussions of diverse cultural media (different literary genres, art forms and film for instance), which offer thoughtful and thought-provoking critiques of our relationships with the environment. Our ability to transcend the ethical and aesthetic categories and discourses that have contributed to our alienation from our environment is dependant upon an enlargement of our imaginative capacities. In a modest way this book might contribute to what Ted Hughes, speaking of the imagination of each new child, described as "nature's chance to correct culture's error".
This authoritative collection of rigorous but accessible essays investigates the exciting new interdisciplinary field of environmental literary criticism.
Today we urgently need to reevaluate the human place in the world in relation to other animals. This book puts Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy into dialogue with literature, evolutionary biology, and animal studies. In a radical departure from most critical animal studies, it argues for evolutionary continuity between human cultural and linguistic behaviors and the semiotic activities of other animals. In his late work, Derrida complained of philosophers who denied that animals possessed such faculties, but he never investigated the wealth of scientific studies of actual animal behavior. Most animal studies theorists still fail to do this. Yet more than fifty years ago, Merleau-Ponty ca...
The story of southern writing—the Dixie Limited, if you will—runs along an iron path: an official narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white patriarchy, and the epic of race. Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture. For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and the workings of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all too familiar everyday. Yae...
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment is an authoritative guide to the exciting new interdisciplinary field of environmental literary criticism. The collection traces the development of ecocriticism from its origins in European pastoral literature and offers fifteen rigorous but accessible essays on the present state of environmental literary scholarship. Contributions from leading experts in the field probe a range of issues, including the place of the human within nature, ecofeminism and gender, engagements with European philosophy and the biological sciences, critical animal studies, postcolonialism, posthumanism, and climate change. A chronology of key publications and bibliography provide ample resources for further reading, making The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment an essential guide for students, teachers, and scholars working in this rapidly developing area of study.
A black moonshiner and civil rights activist's autobiographical report on complex events in southern history neglected by white historians
A background synthesis freshly discussing the work of Chopin, McCullers, O'Connor, Mitchell, and Welty leads to extended treatment of the novels of Shirley Ann Grau, whose protagonists, "keepers of the house," remain their fathers' daughters; of Anne Tyler, whose characters are "fatherless" and "homeless at home"; and Gail Godwin, whose daughter-heroines learn the necessity of autonomy.
In A Global History of Literature and the Environment, an international group of scholars illustrate the immense riches of environmental writing from the earliest literary periods down to the present. It addresses ancient writings about human/animal/plant relations from India, classical Greece, Chinese and Japanese literature, the Maya Popol Vuh, Islamic texts, medieval European works, eighteenth-century and Romantic ecologies, colonial/postcolonial environmental interrelations, responses to industrialization, and the emerging literatures of the world in the present Anthropocene moment. Essays range from Trinidad to New Zealand, Estonia to Brazil. Discussion of these texts indicates a variety of ways environmental criticism can fruitfully engage literary works and cultures from every continent and every historical period. This is a uniquely varied and rich international history of environmental writing from ancient Mesopotamian and Asian works to the present. It provides a compelling account of a topic that is crucial to twenty-first-century global literary studies.