Deserts are highly emblematic spaces: dry, barren, isolated. In literary and cinematic representations, they often betoken collapse and dystopia. Reading Aridity in Western American Literature offer readings of literature set in the US Southwest from ecocritical and new materialist perspectives. The volume explores the diverse epistemologies, histories, relationships, futures, and possibilities that emerge from the representation of American deserts in fiction, film, and literary art. The authors, as well, trace the social, cultural, economic, and biotic narratives that foreground deserts, and how these underscore the challenges of climate change, ecojustice, and human and non-human flourishing. As such, the volume rethinks what deserts are and provides a constructive lens for seeing deserts as more than blank spaces, rather as ecogeographies that challenge, critique, and urge collective ecojustice action.

"Before the West Was West" examines the extent to which scholars have engaged in-depth with pre-1800 "western" texts and asks what we mean by "western" American literature in the first place and "when" that designation originated.

Calling into question the implicit temporal boundaries of the "American West" in literature, a literature often viewed as having commenced only at the beginning of the 1800s, "Before the West Was West" explores the concrete, meaningful connections between different texts as well as the development of national ideologies and mythologies. Examining pre-nineteenth-century writings that do not fit conceptions of the Wild West or of cowboys, cattle ranching, and the Pony Express, these thirteen essays demonstrate that no single, unified idea or geography defines the American West.

Contributors investigate texts ranging from the Norse Vinland Sagas and Mary Rowlandson's famous captivity narrative to early Spanish and French exploration narratives, an eighteenth-century English novel, and a play by Aphra Behn. Through its examination of the disparate and multifaceted body of literature that arises from a broad array of cultural backgrounds and influences, "Before the West Was West "apprehends the literary West in temporal as well as spatial and cultural terms and poses new questions about "westernness" and its literary representation.

"Before the West Was West" examines the extent to which scholars have engaged in-depth with pre-1800 "western" texts and asks what we mean by "western" American literature in the first place and "when" that designation originated.

Calling into question the implicit temporal boundaries of the "American West" in literature, a literature often viewed as having commenced only at the beginning of the 1800s, "Before the West Was West" explores the concrete, meaningful connections between different texts as well as the development of national ideologies and mythologies. Examining pre-nineteenth-century writings that do not fit conceptions of the Wild West or of cowboys, cattle ranching, and the Pony Express, these thirteen essays demonstrate that no single, unified idea or geography defines the American West.

Contributors investigate texts ranging from the Norse Vinland Sagas and Mary Rowlandson's famous captivity narrative to early Spanish and French exploration narratives, an eighteenth-century English novel, and a play by Aphra Behn. Through its examination of the disparate and multifaceted body of literature that arises from a broad array of cultural backgrounds and influences, "Before the West Was West "apprehends the literary West in temporal as well as spatial and cultural terms and poses new questions about "westernness" and its literary representation.

Peregrinate: To travel or wander around from place to place. The land of the United States is defined by vast distances encouraging human movement and migration on a grand scale. Consequently, American stories are filled with descriptions of human bodies walking through the land. In Peregrinations, Amy T. Hamilton examines stories told by and about Indigenous American, Euroamerican, and Mexican walkers. Walking as a central experience that ties these texts together-never simply a metaphor or allegory-offers storytellers and authors an elastic figure through which to engage diverse cultural practices and beliefs including Puritan and Catholic teachings, Dine and Anishinaabe oral traditions, Chicanx histories, and European literary traditions. Hamilton argues that walking bodies alert readers to the ways the physical world-more-than-human animals, trees, rocks, wind, sunlight, and human bodies-has a hand in creating experience and meaning. Through material ecocriticism, a reading practice attentive to historical and ongoing oppressions, exclusions, and displacements, she reveals complex layerings of narrative and materiality in stories of walking human bodies. This powerful and pioneering methodology for understanding place and identity, clarifies the wide variety of American stories about human relationships with the land and the ethical implications of the embeddedness of humans in the more-than-human world.