The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature: The Satisfactions of Soil and Sweat explores environmental writing that foregrounds labor. Ethan Mannon argues that Virgil’s Georgics, as well as the georgic mode in general, exerted considerable influence upon some of America’s best-known writers—including Robert Frost, Willa Cather, and Wendell Berry—and that these and others worked to revise the mode to better fit their own contexts. This book also outlines the contemporary value of the georgic literary tradition—two thousand years of writing that begins with the premise that humans must use the world in order to survive and search for a balance between human needs and nature’s productive capacity. In the georgic mode, authors found an adaptable discourse that enabled them to advocate for the protection and responsible use of productive lands, present rural places and people in all of their complexity, explore human relationships with laboring animals, and advertise the sensory pleasures of rooted work.

Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.

This expansive edited collection explores in depth the georgic genre and its connections to the natural world. Together, its chapters demonstrate that georgic—a genre based primarily on two classical poems about farming, Virgil’s Georgics and Hesiod’s Works and Days—has been reworked by writers throughout modern and early modern English-language literary history as a way of thinking about humans’ relationships with the environment. The book is divided into three sections: Defining Georgic, Managing Nature and Eco-Georgic for the Anthropocene. It centres the georgic genre in the ecocritical conversation, giving it equal prominence with pastoral, elegy and lyric as an example of ‘nature writing’ that can speak to urgent environmental questions throughout literary history and up to the present day. It provides an overview of the myriad ways georgic has been reworked in order to address human relationships with the environment, through focused case studies on individual texts and authors, including James Grainger, William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, Judith Wright and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. This is a much-needed volume for literary critics, academics and students engaged in ecocritical studies, environmental humanities and literature, addressing a significantly overlooked environmental literary genre.

This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America‘s most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.

This open access book suggests new ways of reading nineteenth-century African American literature environmentally. Combining insights from ecocriticism, African American studies, and Foucauldian theory, Matthias Klestil examines forms of environmental knowledge in African American writing ranging from antebellum slave narratives and pamphlets to Charlotte Forten’s journals, Booker T. Washington’s autobiographies, and Charles W. Chesnutt’s short fiction. The volume highlights how literary forms of environmental knowledge in the African American tradition were shaped by the histories of slavery and race, mainstream environmental writing traditions, and African American forms of expression and intertextuality. Turning to the Underground Railroad, debates over education and home-building, and the aesthetics of the pastoral and the georgic, Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature provides an original perspective on the African American ecoliterary tradition that uncovers new facets of canonical and understudied texts and offers new directions for ecocriticism and African American studies.

This award-winning multi-volume series is dedicated to making literature and its creators better understood and more accessible to students and interested readers, while satisfying the standards of librarians, teachers and scholars. Dictionary of Literary Biography provides reliable information in an easily comprehensible format, while placing writers in the larger perspective of literary history. Dictionary of Literary Biography systematically presents career biographies and criticism of writers from all eras and all genres through volumes dedicated to specific types of literature and time periods. For a listing of Dictionary of Literary Biography volumes sorted by genre click here. 01

This original and provocative study tells the story of American literary history from the perspective of its environmental context. Weaving together close readings of early American texts with ecological histories of tobacco, potatoes, apples and honey bees, Michael Ziser presents a method for literary criticism that explodes the conceptual distinction between the civilized and natural world. Beginning with the English exploration of Virginia in the sixteenth century, Ziser argues that the settlement of the 'New World' - and the cultivation and exploitation of its bounty - dramatically altered how writers used language to describe the phenomena they encountered on the frontier. Examining the work of Harriot, Grainger, Cooper, Thoreau and others, Ziser reveals how these authors, whether consciously or not, transcribed the vibrant ecology of North America, and the ways that the environment helped codify a uniquely American literary aesthetic of lasting importance.

Essays on distinctly American nature writers from the earliest to the most recent that have consistently sought to convey both their wonder at the natural world and their individual, personal experiences, within it.

The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature examines the defining role of plants in cultural expression across Latin America, particularly in literature. From the colonial georgic to Pablo Neruda’s Canto general, Lesley Wylie’s close study of botanical imagery demonstrates the fundamental role of the natural world and the relationship between people and plants in the region. Plants are also central to literary forms originating in the Americas, such as the New World Baroque, described by Alejo Carpentier as “nacido de árboles.” The book establishes how vegetal imaginaries are key to Spanish American attempts to renovate European forms and traditions as well as to the reconfiguration of the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Such a reconfiguration, which persistently draws on indigenous animist ontologies to blur the boundaries between people and plants, anticipates much contemporary ecological thinking about our responsibility towards nonhuman nature and shows how environmental thinking by way of plants has a long history in Latin American literature.