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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.
Jada Ach's scholarship in Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements
in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925 seeks to reevaluate
the Progressive Era's environmental legacy. Taking an ecocritical
approach to turn-of-the-century literature set in the American
West, Ach interrogates texts by asking what kinds of environmental,
national, and cultural stories the elements have to tell about land
and oceanic management. Sand, Water, Salt investigates managerial
engagements with dynamic ecologies in three particular Western
environments: the arid deserts, the semiarid high plains, and the
Pacific Ocean. At different times, and to varying degrees,
Americans have deemed these environments economically unproductive,
incompatible with Anglo-American settlement, and/or highly
unmanageable. Despite these varied complaints, the United States
has also intensely desired these "wasteland" spaces, perceiving
them as sources of both national wealth and elite pleasure. Sand,
Water, Salt moves through a variety of novels, memoirs, and
cultural artifacts from the 1880s to the 1920s, including L. Frank
Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Frank Norris's McTeague, Mary
Hunter Austin's The Land of Little Rain, The Virginian by Owen
Wister, Life among the Piutes by Sarah Winnemucca, as well as Jack
London's The Sea-Wolf and Yone Noguchi's The American Diary of a
Japanese Girl. Ach ultimately asks what we gain by looking back at
fin-de-siècle American literature with a queer, ecological
justice-oriented eye, a particularly invigorating conversation that
uniquely uses the elements as foci.
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