Introduction: Loving and Hating Steinbeck. Short Stories in School and Lab: "Tularecito" and "The Snake" -- Drought, Climate, and Race in the West: To a God Unknown -- Race and Revision: "The Vigilante" and "Johnny Bear" -- Becoming Animal: Theories of Mind in The Red Pony -- What Is It Like to Be a Plant?: "The Chrysanthemums" and "The White Quail" -- On Not Being a Modernist: Disability and Performance in Of Mice and Men -- Emergence and Failure: The Middleness of The Grapes of Wrath -- Borderlands: Extinction and the New World Outlook in Sea of Cortez -- Mexican Revolutions: The Forgotten Village, The Pearl, and the Global South -- Epilogue: The Aftertaste of Cannery Row.
Summary:
"John Steinbeck is a towering figure in twentieth-century American literature yet he remains one of our least understood writers. This major reevaluation of Steinbeck by Gavin Jones uncovers a timely thinker who confronted the fate of humanity as a species facing climate change, environmental crisis, and a growing divide between the powerful and the marginalized. Driven by insatiable curiosity, Steinbeck's work crossed a variety of borders - between the United States and the Global South, between human and non-human lifeforms, between science and the arts, and between literature and film - to explore the transformations in consciousness necessary for our survival on a precarious planet. Always seeking new forms to express his ecological and social vision of human interconnectedness and vulnerability, Steinbeck is a writer of urgent concern for the twentieth-first century, even as he was haunted by the legacies of racism and injustice in the American West"-- Provided by publisher.
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