296 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
Literary Criticism / American - Regional | Literary Criticism / Nature | Nature / Regional
As the planet faces ever-worsening disruptions to global ecosystems—carbon and chemical emissions, depletions of the ozone layer, the loss of biodiversity, rising sea levels, air toxification, and worsening floods and droughts—scholars across academia must examine the cultural effects of this increasingly postnatural world. That task proves especially vital for southern studies, given how often the U.S. South serves as a site for large-scale damming initiatives like the TVA, disasters on the scale of Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon spill, and the extraction of coal, oil, and natural gas.
Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies is the first book-length collection of scholarship that applies interdisciplinary environmental humanities research to cultural analyses of the U.S. South. Sixteen essays examine novels, nature writing, films, television, and music that address a broad range of ecological topics related to the region, including climate change, manmade and natural environments, the petroleum industry, food cultures, waterways, natural and human-induced disasters, waste management, and the Anthropocene. Edited by Zackary Vernon, this volume demonstrates how the greening of southern studies, in tandem with the southernization of environmental studies, can catalyze alternative ways of understanding the connections between regional and global cultures and landscapes.
By addressing ecological issues central to life throughout the South, Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies considers the confluence between region and environment, while also illustrating the growing need to see environmental issues as matters of social justice.
Introduction: Southern Studies in the Age of the Anthropocene
ZACKARY VERNON
PART I. COAL, OIL, & SOUTHERN HAZARDSCAPES
Stuck in Place: Affect, Atmosphere, and the Appalachian World of Ann Pancake
LISA HINRICHSEN
Plantation Pasts and the Petrochemical Present: Energy Culture, the Gulf Coast, and Petrochemical America
DELIA BYRNES
Ogling Offshore Oil: Vision and Knowledge in Midcentury Gulf of Mexico Films
ILA TYAGI
PART II. ROUTES, ROADS, & THE RHIZOMATIC SOUTH
“So Many Strange Plants”: Race and Environment in John Muir’s A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf
SCOTT OBERNESSER
Country Roads: Mountain Journeys in the Anthropocene
JIMMY DEAN SMITH
“Home Is Where the Hatred Is”: Gil Scott-Heron’s Toxic Domestic Spaces and the Rhizomatic South
JOSEPH M. THOMPSON
PART III. FARMING & FOODWAYS
Faulkner’s Ecologies and the Legacy of the Nashville Agrarians
SAM HORROCKS
Southern Foodways and Visceral Environmentalism
DANIEL SPOTH
PART IV. FLOODS & SOUTHERN WATER STUDIES
Refrigerators, Mosquitoes, and Phosphates: The Environmental Rhetoric of David E. Lilienthal
LUCAS J. SHEAFFER
Flooding Mississippi: Memory, Race, and Landscape in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
CHRISTOPHER LLOYD
“I Want My City Back!”: The Boundaries of the Katrina Diaspora
EVANGELIA KINDINGER
The Universe Unraveled: Swampy Embeddedness and Ecological Apocalypse in Beasts of the Southern Wild
SARAH E. MCFARLAND
PART V. ECO-DYSTOPIAS
Grave Nature: Caroline Lee Hentz’s Dead Slaves and the Eco-dystopia of the Old South
JOSHUA MYERS
Sexual Assault and the Rape of Nature in Child of God and Deliverance
JONATHAN VILLALOBOS
Florida Man: Climatological Racism and Internal Homonationalism in US Political Satire
JOHN MORAN
New Orleans in the Twenty-Second Century
ROBERT AZZARELLO
Afterwor(l)d: The Future in the Present
JAY WATSON
Zackary Vernon is assistant professor of English at Appalachian State University and the coeditor of Summoning the Dead: Essays on Ron Rash.
Jay Watson is the Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies at the University of Mississippi, where he directs the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. He is the author of several books, including Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893–1985.
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