A history of ecology and environmentalism in Spanish American literature / Scott M. DeVries.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

DeVries, Scott M., 1973- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Spanish American literature--History and criticism.

Spanish American literature.

Ecology in literature.

Environmentalism in literature.

Physical Description:

x, 323 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Lanham, Maryland : Bucknell University Press, [2013]

Summary:

A History of Ecology and Environmentalism in Spanish American Literature undertakes a comprehensive ecocritical examination of the region's literature from nineteenth-century foundational texts to the most recent fiction. The book begins with a consideration of the way in which Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's views of nature through the lens of the categories of "civilization" and "barbarity" from Facundo (1845) are systematically challenged and revised in the rest of the century. Subsequently, chapters find that many of the well-established titles of from modernista, regional, and indigenista literature may be contrasted to counter-traditions within those genres that express aspects of environmental justice, "deep ecology," the relational role of emotion in conservationism, even the rights of nonhuman nature. The final chapters examine how ecological advocacy in contemporary fiction is more explicit than what came before but also impacts some of the more formal elements of literature. Certain textual conventions such as the use of unique language and imagery, unusual focalizations, non-chronological narrative sequences, biting satire, and wry parody represent innovations of form that proceed directly from the ethical advocacy within these more recent novels. A History of Ecology and Environmentalism in Spanish American Literature attempts to develop a sense of the way in which ecological ideas have developed over time in the literature, but particularly how many Spanish American texts anticipate several of the ecological discourses which have recently become so central to global culture, current environmentalist thought, and the future of humankind. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part 1 Foundations, Aesthetics, Ecology

1 Foundations of Environment: Literary Political Ecologies of Nineteenth Century Southern Cone Literature 33

2 Foundations from Topography: Literary Political Ecologies of Nineteenth Century Andean, Amazonian, Caribbean, and Central American Literature 71

3 Green Modernism 99

Part 2 Land, People, Ecology

4 Swallowed: Environmentalism and the Spanish American novelet de la selva 137

5 Other Lands: Ecology in the Spanish American novela de la tierra 161

6 Ruin: The Precedents of Ecological Destruction in Early and Canonical indigenista Novels 183

7 Indigenous Land: Place, then Space 207

Part 3 Literature, Environmentalism, Ecology

8 Nature after the "Boom": Ecology and Environmentalism in Late Twentieth Century Spanish American Fiction 245

9 Eco-Satire: Green Humor, Contaminated Imagery, and Environmental Language in Recent Spanish American Fiction 263

10 Paradise Trashed: Utopian and Dystopian Ecological Scenarios in Gioconda Belli's Waslala and Fernando Raga's Gaia Trilogy 281.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781611485158

1611485150

OCLC:

842111965