Overview
- Reinterprets familiar Romantic environmental texts in conversation with neglected texts by African American, Native American, and women writers
- Engages contemporary debates in environmental humanities to extend the “materialist turn”
- Seeks to inform environmental justice activism today by examining the environmental traditions of the Romantic period
Part of the book series: Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment (LCE)
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Table of contents (5 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
The Literary Heritage of the Environmental Justice Movement showcases environmental literature from writers who fought for women’s rights, native rights, workers’ power, and the abolition of slavery during the Romantic Era. Many Romantic texts take flight from society and enact solitary white male encounters with a feminine nature. However, the symbolic landscapes of Romanticism were often radicalized by writers like Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, William Apess, George Copway, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lydia Maria Child, John Clare, and Henry Thoreau. These authors showed how the oppression of human beings and the exploitation of nature are the twin driving forces of capitalism and colonialism. In addition to spotlighting new kinds of environmental literature, this book also reinterprets familiar texts by figures like William Blake, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and Walt Whitman, and it shows how these household figures were writing in conversation with their radical contemporaries.
Reviews
“Have we really come to the end of nature? Has environmentalism always been divided from social justice? Before you decide, read this book. This text rediscovers the ‘radical pastoral,’ a vibrant and diverse tradition of writers and activists from William Blake and Mary Shelley to Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, Henry Thoreau, and John Clare, who all saw in nature’s green commons an urgent call for radical social transformation. Lance Newman’s prose crackles with new ideas as he defends an Earth that generations past have nourished with their tears and their hopes. The result is an urgent call for the greening of the 21st century.” (Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life (2017))
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Lance Newman is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. He is the author of Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature (Palgrave, 2005) and co-editor of Transatlantic Romanticism: An Anthology of British, American, and Canadian Literature, 1767-1867 (2006).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Literary Heritage of the Environmental Justice Movement
Book Subtitle: Landscapes of Revolution in Transatlantic Romanticism
Authors: Lance Newman
Series Title: Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14572-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-14571-2Published: 08 May 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-14574-3Published: 03 May 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-14572-9Published: 11 May 2019
Series ISSN: 2946-3157
Series E-ISSN: 2946-3165
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: V, 238
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Literary History, Environmental Communication