Against Sustainability: Reading Nineteenth-Century America in the Age of Climate Crisis

Against Sustainability: Reading Nineteenth-Century America in the Age of Climate Crisis

by Michelle Neely
Against Sustainability: Reading Nineteenth-Century America in the Age of Climate Crisis

Against Sustainability: Reading Nineteenth-Century America in the Age of Climate Crisis

by Michelle Neely

eBook

$24.99  $32.99 Save 24% Current price is $24.99, Original price is $32.99. You Save 24%.

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

Against Sustainability responds to the twenty-first-century environmental crisis by unearthing the nineteenth-century U.S. literary, cultural, and scientific contexts that gave rise to sustainability, recycling, and preservation. Through novel pairings of antebellum and contemporary writers including Walt Whitman and Lucille Clifton, George Catlin and Louise Erdrich, and Herman Melville and A. S. Byatt, the book demonstrates that some of our most vaunted strategies to address ecological crisis in fact perpetuate environmental degradation.

Yet Michelle C. Neely also reveals that the nineteenth century offers useful and generative environmentalisms, if only we know where and how to find them. Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson experimented with models of joyful, anti-consumerist frugality. Hannah Crafts and Harriet Wilson devised forms of radical pet-keeping that model more just ways of living with others. Ultimately, the book explores forms of utopianism that might more reliably guide mainstream environmental culture toward transformative forms of ecological and social justice. Through new readings of familiar texts, Against Sustainability demonstrates how nineteenth-century U.S. literature can help us rethink our environmental paradigms in order to imagine more just and environmentally sound futures.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780823288212
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Publication date: 06/02/2020
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 224
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Michelle C. Neely is Assistant Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty in Environmental Studies and American Studies at Connecticut College.

Table of Contents

Introduction. The Unlikely Environmentalisms of Nineteenth-Century American Literature | 1

1. Recycling Fantasies: Whitman, Clifton, and the Dream of Compost | 21

2. Joyful Frugality: Thoreau, Dickinson, and the Pleasures of Not Consuming | 51

3. The Problem with Preservation: Aesthetics and Sanctuary in
Catlin, Parkman, Erdrich, Melville, and Byatt | 85

4. Radical Pet Keeping: Crafts, Wilson, and Living with Others in the Anthropocene | 116

Coda. Embracing Green Temporalities: Indigenous Sustainabilities, Anglo-American Utopias | 147

Acknowledgments | 157

Notes | 161

Bibliography | 201

Index | 221

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews