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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary theory
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The Green Breast of the New World - Landscape, Gender and American Fiction (Paperback, New Ed)
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The Green Breast of the New World - Landscape, Gender and American Fiction (Paperback, New Ed)
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In searching American literary landscapes for what they can reveal
about our attitudes toward nature and gender, The Green Breast of
the New World considers symbolic landscapes in twentieth-century
American fiction, the characters who inhabit those landscapes, and
the gendered traditions that can influence the figuration of both
of these fictional elements. In this century, says Louise H.
Westling, American literary responses to landscape and nature have
been characterized by a puzzling mix of eroticism and misogyny,
celebration and mourning, and reverence and disregard. Focusing on
problems of gender conflict and imperialist nostalgia, The Green
Breast of the New World addresses this ambivalence. Westling begins
with a "deep history" of literary landscapes, looking back to the
archaic Mediterranean/Mesopotamian traditions that frame European
and American symbolic figurations of humans in the land. Drawing on
sources as ancient as the Sumerian Hymns to Innana and the Epic of
Gilgamesh, she reveals a tradition of male heroic identity grounded
in an antagonistic attitude toward the feminized earth and nature.
This identity recently has been used to mask a violent destruction
of wilderness and indigenous peoples in the fictions of progress
that have shaped our culture. Examining the midwestern landscapes
of Willa Cather's Jim Burden and Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams, and
the Mississippi Delta of William Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen and Isaac
McCaslin and Eudora Welty's plantation families and small-town
dwellers, Westling shows that these characters all participate in a
cultural habit of gendering the landscape as female and then
excusing their mistreatment of it by retreating into a
nostalgiathat erases their real motives, displaces responsibility,
and takes refuge in attitudes of self-pitying adoration.
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