Catrin Gersdorf

Sylvia Mayer

Beiträge zu Ökologie und Literaturwissenschaft

Natur, Kultur, Text

Christof Mauch

This volume focuses on environmental knowledge production in the United States by taking as starting points the impact of natural catastrophes and of public debates on climate change and environmental threats. Individual chapters address the social, political, economic, ecological, as well as cultural effects of natural catastrophes. At stake are issues such as disaster management and politics, disaster as spectacle, and the popular imagination of catastrophe. In bringing together historians and geographers, literary and cultural studies scholars, political scientists, anthropologists, and scientists from the United States and Europe, this volume demonstrates that the human experience and imagination of environment have played a truly important role in American culture.

Climate, Cultures, Catastrophe

American Environments

Ever since feminist scholarship began to reintroduce Harriet Beecher Stowe's writings to the American Literary canon in the 1970s, critical interest in her work has steadily increased. Rediscovery and ultimate canonization, however, have concentrated to a large extent on her major novelistic achievement, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Only in recent years have critics begun to focus more seriously on the wide variety of her work and started to create knowledge that broadens our understanding. Beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited by Sylvia Mayer and Monika Mueller, shows that during her long writing and publishing career, Stowe was a highly prolific writer who targeted diverse audiences, dealt with drastically changing economic, commercial, and cultural contexts, and wrote in a diversity of genres. Reflecting a recent trend to move Stowe's other texts to the fore, the essays collected in this volume thus go beyond the critical focus on Uncle Tom's Cabin. They focus on several of Stowe's other texts that have also significantly contributed to American literary and cultural history, among them her New England novels, her New York City novels, and her fictional writings on religious differences between Europe and the U.S. The essays in the first part of Beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe concentrate on Stowe's language use, her rhetoric and choices of narrative technique and style, while the essays in the second part concentrate on thematic issues such as the representation of race, ethnicity, and religion, her participation in the emerging environmentalist movement, and Stowe's response to major economic shifts after the Civil War.

Essays on the Writing of Harriet Beecher Stowe

Beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin

Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies is a collection of essays written by European and North American scholars who argue that nature and culture can no longer be thought of in oppositional, mutually exclusive terms. They are united in an effort to push the theoretical limits of ecocriticism towards a more rigorous investigation of nature's critical potential as a concept that challenges modern culture's philosophical assumptions, epistemological convictions, aesthetic principles, and ethical imperatives. This volume offers scholars and students of literature, culture, history, philosophy, and linguistics new insights into the ongoing transformation of ecocriticism into an innovative force in international and interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies.

Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism

Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies

Since its emergence in the second half of the nineteenth century, American environmentalism has predominantly been a white, middle-class pursuit, being preoccupied with notions of wilderness and wildlife preservation. Only fairly recently, with the advent of the environmental justice movement in the 1980s, has American environmentalism broadened its definition of "environment" to include the concerns relevant to a community's way of living. Of particular disproportionate importance are the concerns of poor urban communities of color, which have been exposed to environmental hazards. This volume--one of the first collections of ecocritical essays devoted exclusively to African American texts--shows that African Americans have contributed to the efforts of the environmental justice movement, not only as political activists, but also as writers. The essays range from studies of nineteenth-century slave narratives to twentieth-century texts by Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Charles Johnson, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler. Employing a variety of theoretical and methodological premises, they provide insight into the texts' various conceptualizations of "nature," "culture," and "humanness" and their implications for environmental ethics. Sylvia Mayer teaches at the Department of English Literature at the University of Mnster, Germany.

Essays on the African American Environmental Imagination

Restoring the Connection to the Natural World

Monika Mueller

Ever since feminist scholarship began to reintroduce Harriet Beecher Stowe's writings to the American literary canon in the 1970s, critical interest in her work has steadily increased. Beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited by Sylvia Mayer and Monika Mueller, shows that during her long writing and publishing career, Stowe was a highly prolific writer who targeted diverse audiences, dealt with drastically changing economic, commercial, and cultural contexts, and wrote in a diversity of genres.

Sylvia Mayer

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