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.

Recent scholarship has evidenced a need to reconsider the history and literature of the American Southwest. This book speaks to that challenge and offers a new way to engage literary and cultural studies to show that in the "bordered frontier" border theory is a necessary means to deconstructing a frontier mythology still extant in the Southwest. Whereas most scholarly works yet perpetuate an academic divide between frontier mythogenesis and border studies, this book explodes current theoretical models to offer a postmodern critique of the Southwestern frontier via the lens of border theory and third space feminism. By conceptualizing a methodology of space and place rooted in historiography and social and cultural geographical models, this book re-situates borderland identities. The result is a model, a fresh approach that disorients the frontier with the goal of narrative inclusivity for all peoples of the Southwest. As the book speaks to new trends and scholarship via an interdisciplinary approach, it will be useful for laypersons interested in the Southwest and in American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Multiethnic Literature, and Western History courses.