Actions for Fallen forests : emotion, embodiment, and ethics in American women's environmental writing, 1781-1924

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

Author
Kilcup, Karen L.
Published
Athens and London : University of Georgia Press, [2013]
Copyright Date
©2013
Physical Description
1 online resource (xv, 504 pages) : illustrations
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Language Note
English.
Contents
Grounding the texts : an introduction -- "We planted, tended, and harvested our corn" : native mothers, resource wars, and conversion narratives -- "Such progress in civilization" : forest life and mushroom growth, East, West, and South -- Golden hands : weaving America -- Gilt-edged or "beautifully unadorned" : fashioning feelings -- Domestic and national moralities : justice in the West -- After words : toward common ground.
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, this book 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. This book contributes to scholarship in American women's writing, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and feminist rhetoric, expanding the literary, historical, and theoretical grounds for some of the twenty-first century's pressing environmental debates. The author 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 environmental orthodoxies. Unlike previous ecocritical works, this book includes marginalized texts by African American, Native American, Mexican American, working-class, and non-Protestant women. The author 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. --
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Genre(s)
ISBN
9780820345710 (electronic bk.)
0820345717 (electronic bk.)
9780820332864
0820332860
0820345008
9780820345000 (paperback)
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references (pages 429-485) and index.
View MARC record | catkey: 43174017