Environmental evasion : the literary, critical, and cultural politics of "Nature's Nation" / / Lloyd Willis

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910973946703321
• Autore: Willis Lloyd <1978->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Albany, : State University of New York Press, c2011
• ISBN: 9781438432830; 1438432836; 9781441692306; 1441692304
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (203 p.)
• Disciplina: 810.9/36
• Soggetti: American literature - History and criticism; Environmental literature - History and criticism; Environmental policy in literature; Environmentalism in literature; Human ecology in literature
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Introduction: American literature and environmental politics. Chapter 1: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the formation of American literature's core environmental values -- Chapter 2: James Fenimore Cooper, canon formation, and American literature's erasure of environmental anxiety -- Chapter 3: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the American canon's erasure of material nature -- Chapter 4: Willa Cather and John Steinbeck, environmental schizophrenia and monstrous ecology -- Chapter 5: Zora Neale Hurston, the power of Harlem, and the promise of Florida -- Afterword: Ernest Hemingway, and American literature's legacy of environmental disengagement.
• Sommario/riassunto: How do we reconcile the abstract reverence for the natural world central to American literary history, beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Nature," with over a century and a half of widespread environmental destruction? Environmental Evasion examines the environmental implications of literary and cultural productions by writers from James Femimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ; to Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and Zora Neale Hurston. Lloyd Willis provocatively argues that the environmentalist outlooks by Cooper and Longfellow were eclipsed by Ralph Waldo Emerson's abstract, imperialist vision of nature. He demonstrates how many 20th century American writers have taken the Emersonian approach, participating in a silent but extremely powerful form of evasive environmental politics in the ways in which they write about the natural world. Attentive to the inherent political dimensions of all texts, Environmental Evasion insists on the relevance of environmental history and politics to New Americanist approaches to the literary canon.