Introduction: Southern studies in the age of the Anthropocene / Zackary Vernon -- Coal, oil, and southern hazardscapes. Stuck in place: affect, atmosphere, and the Appalachian world of Ann Pancake / Lisa Hinrichsen ; Plantation pasts and the petrochemical present: energy culture, the Gulf Coast, and petrochemical America / Delia Byrnes ; Ogling offshore oil: vision and knowledge in midcentury Gulf of Mexico films / Ila Tyagi -- Routes, roads, and the rhizomatic South. "So many strange plants": race and environment in John Muir's a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf / Scott Obernesser ; Country roads: mountain journeys in the Anthropocene / Jimmy Dean Smith ; "Home is where the hatred is": Gil Scott-Heron's toxic domestic spaces and the rhizomatic South / Joseph M. Thompson -- Farming and foodways. Faulkner's ecologies and the legacy of the Nashville Agrarians / Sam Horrocks ; Southern foodways and visceral environmentalism / Daniel Spoth -- Floods and southern water studies. Refrigerators, Mosquitoes, and Phosphates: The Environmental Rhetoric of David E. Lilienthal / Lucas J. Sheaffer ; Flooding Mississippi: Memory, Race, and Landscape in Twenty-First-Century Fiction / Christopher Lloyd ; "I Want My City Back!": The Boundaries of the Katrina Diaspora / Evangelia Kindinger ; The Universe Unraveled: Swampy Embeddedness and Ecological Apocalypse in Beasts of the Southern Wild / Sarah E. McFarland -- Eco-dystopias. Grave Nature: Caroline Lee Hentz's Dead Slaves and the Eco-dystopia of the Old South / Joshua Myers ; Sexual Assault and the Rape of Nature in Child of God and Deliverance / Jonathan Villalobos ; Florida Man: Climatological Racism and Internal Homonationalism in US Political Satire / John Moran ; New Orleans in the Twenty-Second Century / Robert Azzarello -- Afterword: The Future in the Present / Jay Watson.
Summary:
"Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies is the first book-length collection of scholarship that applies interdisciplinary environmental studies research to cultural analyses of the U.S. South. The essays analyze novels, nature writing, films, television, and music that address a broad range of environmental topics related to the South, including climate change, built and natural environments, the petroleum industry, food cultures, waterways, natural disasters, dystopian climate fiction (eco-dystopias), and the Anthropocene. Edited by Zackary Vernon, this collection demonstrates how the greening of southern studies can catalyze alternative ways of seeing the region and its places and spaces. By addressing ecological issues central to life throughout the South, Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies confronts the confluences between regional and environmental concerns, while also illustrating the need to see environmental issues as matters of social justice"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.