Ruin and resilience : Southern literature and the environment

Author / Creator

Spoth, Daniel, author

Available as

Online

Summary

"In Ruin and Resilience, Daniel Spoth confronts why the environmental stories told about the US South curve inevitably toward tragic plotlines. Studying over a dozen works of postbellum southern li...

"In Ruin and Resilience, Daniel Spoth confronts why the environmental stories told about the US South curve inevitably toward tragic plotlines. Studying over a dozen works of postbellum southern 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 eco-narrative is transformed by contemporary southern food studies, climate fiction, and speculative fiction. Phrased as a reaction to the rising temperatures and swelling sea levels in the South, this ecocritical project conceptualizes an environmental 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. Environmentally centered approaches to the South, according to Spoth, are poised between competing narratives of fatalistic ruin and optimistic yet flawed resilience, creating an uncertain future for the region that is deeply inflected by longstanding patterns of race, class, and gender-based inequality in both its formation and perpetuation. The US South has often been neglected by ecocriticism and environmental humanities scholarship. Ruin and Resilience reexamines the South in light of the dominant environmental narratives that have defined the region, charting their origins and their consequences"--

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