Exhausted Ecologies: Modernism and Environmental Recovery
Cambridge University Press, 1/23/2020
EAN 9781108477918, ISBN10: 1108477917
Hardcover, 342 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
This book evaluates twentieth century British and Global Anglophone literature in relation to the growth of ecological thinking in the United Kingdom. Restless modernists such as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Jean Rhys developed a literary aesthetic of slowness and immediacy to critique the exhausting and dehumanizing aspects of modern urban and industrial life. At the same time, environmental groups such as the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves and the Smoke Abatement League moved from economic registers of 'value' and 'trust' to more cultural terms of 'recovery' and 'regeneration' to position nature as a healing force in the postwar era. Through a variety of literary, scientific, and political texts, an environmental movement emerged alongside the fast, fragmented, and traumatic aspects of modernization in order to sustain place and community in terms of lateral influence and ecological dependence.
Introduction
places of rest
1. Nature's reserves
rural exhaustion, inertia, and generative aesthetics
2. Urban environs
James Joyce and the politics of shared atmosphere
3. Waste lands
dark pastoral in T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Djuna Barnes
4. Uprooting empire
Jean Rhys and unrest in imperial centers
5. Decolonizing ecology
Chinua Achebe's new forms of unease
Conclusion
the limits of modernist regeneration.