Writing for an Endangered World : Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U. S. and Beyond

by Buell, Lawrence

• ISBN13: 9780674004498
• ISBN10: 0674004493
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-04-01
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

The environmental imagination does not stop short at the edge of the woods. Nor should our understanding of it, as Lawrence Buell makes powerfully clear in his new book that aims to reshape the field of literature and environmental studies. Emphasizing the influence of the physical environment on individual and collective perception, his book thus provides the theoretical underpinnings for an ecocriticism now reaching full power, and does so in remarkably clear and concrete ways. Writing for an Endangered World offers a conception of the physical environment--whether built or natural--as simultaneously found and constructed, and treats imaginative representations of it as acts of both discovery and invention. A number of the chapters develop this idea through parallel studies of figures identified with either "natural" or urban settings: John Muir and Jane Addams; Aldo Leopold and William Faulkner; Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Dreiser; Wendell Berry and Gwendolyn Brooks. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, but ranging freely across national borders, his book reimagines city and country as a single complex landscape.

Author Biography

Lawrence Buell is John P. Marquand Professor of English, Harvard University.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(8)
``America the Beautiful,''	9	(9)
Jane Addams
John Muir
Environmental Imagination and Environmental Unconscious	18	(9)
Outline of This Book	27	(3)
Toxic Discourse	30	(25)
The Toxic Denominator	32	(3)
Toxic Discourse Anatomized	35	(10)
Toxicity, Risk, and Literary Imagination	45	(10)
The Place of Place	55	(29)
The Elusiveness of Place	59	(5)
Five Dimensions of Place-Connectedness	64	(10)
The Importance of Place Imagination	74	(4)
Retrieval of the Unloved Place: Wideman	78	(6)
Flaneur's Progress: Reinhabiting the City	84	(45)
Romantic Urbanism: Whitman, Olmsted, and Others	90	(13)
High Modernism and Modern Urban Theory	103	(6)
Whitmanian Modernism: William Carlos Williams as Bioregionalist	109	(11)
Later Trajectories	120	(9)
Discourses of Determinism	129	(41)
Urban Fiction from Dickens through Wright	131	(12)
Rurality as Fate	143	(6)
Consolations of Determinism: Dreiser and Jeffers	149	(8)
Observing Limits in Literature and Life: Berry and Brooks	157	(10)
Speaking for the Determined: Addams	167	(3)
Modernization and the Claims of the Natural World: Faulkner and Leopold	170	(26)
Faulkner as Environmental Historian	171	(6)
Go Down, Moses and Environmental Unconscious	177	(6)
Faulkner, Leopold, and Ecological Ethics	183	(13)
Global Commons as Resource and as Icon: Imagining Oceans and Whales	196	(28)
Resymbolizing Ocean	199	(6)
Moby-Dick and the Hierarchies of Nation, Culture, and Species	205	(9)
Imagining Interspeciesism: The Lure of the Megafauna	214	(10)
The Misery of Beasts and Humans: Nonanthropocentric Ethics versus Environmental Justice	224	(19)
Schisms	225	(11)
Mediations	236	(7)
Watershed Aesthetics	243	(24)
From River to Watershed	244	(8)
Modern Watershed Consciousness: Mary Austin to the Present	252	(15)
Notes	267	(74)
Acknowledgments	341	(4)
Index	345