Ruin and Resilience: Southern Literature and the Environment (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780807179369)

In Ruin and Resilience, Daniel Spoth confronts why the environmental stories told about the U.S. South curve inevitably toward distressing plotlines. Examining more than a dozen works of postbellum 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 econarrative is transformed by contemporary food studies, climate fiction, and speculative tales inspired by the region.

Phrased as a reaction to the rising temperatures and swelling sea levels in the South, Ruin and Resilience conceptualizes an environmental, ecocritical 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.

Author: Daniel Spoth
ISBN-10: 0807179361
ISBN-13: 9780807179369
Publisher: LSU Press
Language: English
Published: 04/05/2023
Pages: 216
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.08lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2024