Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, 1895-1941

Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, 1895-1941
Author: John Claborn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2017-11-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350009431

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This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The beginning of the 20th century marked a new phase of the battle for civil rights in America. But many of the era's most important African-American writers were also acutely aware of the importance of environmental justice to the struggle. Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature is the first book to explore the centrality of environmental problems to writing from the civil rights movement in the early decades of the century. Bringing ecocritical perspectives to bear on the work of such important writers as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and Depression-era African-American writing, the book brings to light a vital new perspective on ecocriticism and modern American literary history.

Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature

Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature
Author: Matthias Klestil
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2023-04-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030821021

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This open access book suggests new ways of reading nineteenth-century African American literature environmentally. Combining insights from ecocriticism, African American studies, and Foucauldian theory, Matthias Klestil examines forms of environmental knowledge in African American writing ranging from antebellum slave narratives and pamphlets to Charlotte Forten’s journals, Booker T. Washington’s autobiographies, and Charles W. Chesnutt’s short fiction. The volume highlights how literary forms of environmental knowledge in the African American tradition were shaped by the histories of slavery and race, mainstream environmental writing traditions, and African American forms of expression and intertextuality. Turning to the Underground Railroad, debates over education and home-building, and the aesthetics of the pastoral and the georgic, Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature provides an original perspective on the African American ecoliterary tradition that uncovers new facets of canonical and understudied texts and offers new directions for ecocriticism and African American studies.

African American Literature

African American Literature
Author: Hans Ostrom
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 571
Release: 2019-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

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This essential volume provides an overview of and introduction to African American writers and literary periods from their beginnings through the 21st century. This compact encyclopedia, aimed at students, selects the most important authors, literary movements, and key topics for them to know. Entries cover the most influential and highly regarded African American writers, including novelists, playwrights, poets, and nonfiction writers. The book covers key periods of African American literature—such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and the Civil Rights Era—and touches on the influence of the vernacular, including blues and hip hop. The volume provides historical context for critical viewpoints including feminism, social class, and racial politics. Entries are organized A to Z and provide biographies that focus on the contributions of key literary figures as well as overviews, background information, and definitions for key subjects.

New Forms of Environmental Writing

New Forms of Environmental Writing
Author: Timothy C. Baker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2022-05-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350271322

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Surveying a wide range of contemporary poetry, fiction, and memoir by women writers, this book explores our most pressing environmental concerns and shows how these texts find innovative new ways to respond to our environmental crisis. Arguing for the centrality of individual encounter and fragmentary form in 21st-century literature, as well as themes of attention, care, and loss, Baker highlights the ways that fragmentary texts can be seen as a mode of resistance. These texts provide new ways to consider the role of individual agency and enmeshment in a more-than-human world. The author proposes a new model of 'gleaning' to encompass ideas of collection, assemblage, and relinquishment and draws on theoretical perspectives such as ecofeminism, new materialism and posthumanism. Examining works by writers including Sara Baume, Ali Smith, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Bhanu Kapil and Kathleen Jamie, Baker provides important new insights into understanding our planetary predicament.

Magic, Literature and Climate Pedagogy in a Time of Ecological Crisis

Magic, Literature and Climate Pedagogy in a Time of Ecological Crisis
Author: Sofia Ahlberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2024-08-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350401161

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Channeling the creative potential of humanity to transition towards joyous and just futures in times of life-threatening climate change, this book uses metaphors of magic and shapeshifting to imagine liveable futures achievable through other-than-rational means. Focusing on a wide range of 20th and 21st-century novels from a diverse range of writers such as Madeline Miller, Jeff VanderMeer, Ursula LeGuin, N.K. Jemisin, Ambelin Kwaymullina and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, it suggests that readers take seriously the pedagogical potential of magic in literature for the classroom and beyond while providing them with contextualized, collective methods of climate action.

Teaching Environmental Writing

Teaching Environmental Writing
Author: Isabel Galleymore
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2020-05-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 135006842X

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Environmental writing is an increasingly popular literary genre, and a multifaceted genre at that. Recently dominated by works of 'new nature writing', environmental writing includes works of poetry and fiction about the world around us. In the last two decades, universities have begun to offer environmental writing modules and courses with the intention of teaching students skills in the field of writing inspired by the natural world. This book asks how students are being guided into writing about environments. Informed by independently conducted interviews with educators, and a review of existing pedagogical guides, it explores recurring instructions given to students for writing about the environment and compares these pedagogical approaches to the current theory and practice of ecocriticism by scholars such as Ursula Heise and Timothy Morton. Proposing a set of original pedagogical exercises influenced by ecocriticism, the book draws on a number of self-reflexive, environmentally-conscious poets, including Juliana Spahr, Jorie Graham and Les Murray, as creative and stimulating models for teachers and students.

Ecocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction

Ecocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction
Author: Sarah E. McFarland
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2021-01-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350177660

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This work analyzes 21st-century realistic speculations of human extinction: fictions that imagine future worlds without interventions of as-yet uninvented technology, interplanetary travel, or other science fiction elements that provide hope for rescue or long-term survival. Climate change fiction as a genre of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic writing usually resists facing the potentiality of human species extinction, following instead traditional generic conventions that imagine primitivist communities of human survivors with the means of escaping the consequences of global climate change. Yet amidst the ongoing sixth great extinction, works that problematize survival, provide no opportunities for social rebirth, and speculate humanity's final end may address the problem of how to reject the impulse of human exceptionalism that pervades climate change discourse and post-apocalyptic fiction. Rather than following the preferences of the genre, the ecocollapse fictions examined here manifest apocalypse where the means for a happy ending no longer exists. In these texts, diminished ecosystems, specters of cannibalism, and disintegrations of difference and othering render human self-identity as radically malleable within their confrontations with the stark materiality of all life. This book is the first in-depth exploration of contemporary fictions that imagine the imbrication of human and nonhuman within global species extinctions. It closely interrogates novels from authors like Peter Heller, Cormac McCarthy and Yann Martel that reject the impulse of human exceptionalism to demonstrate what it might be like to go extinct.

The Roots of Cane

The Roots of Cane
Author: John Kevin Young
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2024
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1609389654

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The Roots of Cane proposes a new way to read one of the most significant works of the New Negro Renaissance, Jean Toomer's Cane. John Young traces the many pieces of Cane that were dispersed across multiple modernist magazines from 1922 through 1923. Interweaving a periodical-studies approach to modernism with book history and critical race theory, Young resituates Toomer's uneasy place within Black modernism by asking how original readers would have encountered his work.

Imagining the Plains of Latin America

Imagining the Plains of Latin America
Author: Axel Pérez Trujillo Diniz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2021-04-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1350134309

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From the Pampas lowlands of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil to the Altiplano plateau that stretches between Chile and Peru, the plains of Latin America have haunted the literature and culture of the continent. Bringing these landscapes into focus as a major subject of Latin American culture, this book outlines innovative new ecocritcial readings of canonical literary texts from the 19th century to the present. Tracing these natural landscapes across national borders the book develops a new transnational understanding of Hispanic culture in South America and expands the scope of the contemporary environmental humanities. Texts covered include works by: Ciro Alegría, Manoel de Barros, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Rómulo Gallegos, José Eustasio Rivera, João Guimarães Rosa, and Domingo Sarmiento.

Environmental Cultures in Soviet East Europe

Environmental Cultures in Soviet East Europe
Author: Anna Barcz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2020-12-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 135009837X

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For more than 40 years Eastern European culture came under the sway of Soviet rule. What is the legacy of this period for cultural attitudes to the environment and the contemporary battle to confront climate change? This is the first in-depth study of the legacy of the Soviet era on attitudes to the environment in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Ukraine. Exploring responses in literature, culture and film to political projects such as the collectivisation of agricultural land, the expansion of the mining industry and disasters such as the Chernobyl explosion, Anna Barcz opens up new understandings of local political traditions and examines how they might be harnessed in the cause of contemporary environmental activism. The book covers works by writers such as Christa Wolf, the Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich and film-makers such as Béla Tarr, Andrzej Wajda and Wladyslaw Pasikowski.