Fallen forests : emotion, embodiment, and ethics in American women's environmental writing, 1781-1924 / Karen L. Kilcup.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kilcup, Karen L.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

Environmental protection in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (521 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Athens, GA : University of Georgia Press, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"In 1844, Lydia Sigourney asserted, "Man's warfare on the trees is terrible." Like Sigourney many American women of her day engaged with such issues as sustainability, resource wars, globalization, voluntary simplicity, Christian ecology, and environmental justice. Illuminating the foundations for contemporary women's environmental writing, Fallen Forests shows how their nineteenth-century predecessors marshaled powerful affective, ethical, and spiritual resources to chastise, educate, and motivate readers to engage in positive social change. Fallen Forests contributes to scholarship in American women's writing, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and feminist rhetoric, expanding the literary, historical, and theoretical grounds for some of today's most pressing environmental debates. Karen L. Kilcup rejects prior critical emphases on sentimentalism to show how women writers have drawn on their literary emotional intelligence to raise readers' consciousness about social and environmental issues. She also critiques ecocriticism's idealizing tendency, which has elided women's complicity in agendas that depart from today's environmental orthodoxies. Unlike previous ecocritical works, Fallen Forests includes marginalized texts by African American, Native American, Mexican American, working-class, and non-Protestant women. Kilcup also enlarges ecocriticism's genre foundations, showing how Cherokee oratory, travel writing, slave narrative, diary, polemic, sketches, novels, poetry, and expose intervene in important environmental debates"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Cover; Contents; List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Grounding the Texts: An Introduction; CHAPTER 1 "We planted, tended, and harvested our corn": Native Mothers, Resource Wars, and Conversion Narratives; CHAPTER 2 "Such Progress in Civilization": Forest Life and Mushroom Growth, East, West, and South; CHAPTER 3 Golden Hands: Weaving America; CHAPTER 4 Gilt-Edged or "Beautifully Unadorned": Fashioning Feelings; CHAPTER 5 Domestic and National Moralities: Justice in the West; After Words: Toward Common Ground; Notes; Bibliography; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; Q; R

ST; U; V; W; Y; Z

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780820345710

0820345717

OCLC:

859687906