Description
Book SynopsisAgainst Sustainability responds to contemporary environmental crisis not by seeking the origins of U.S. environmental problems, but by returning to the nineteenth-century literature and cultural contexts that gave rise to many of our most familiar environmental solutions. Chapters explore sustainability, recycling, frugality, preservation, radical pet keeping, zero waste, and utopianism.
Table of ContentsIntroduction. The Unlikely Environmentalisms of Nineteenth-Century American Literature | 1
1. Recycling Fantasies: Whitman, Clifton, and the Dream of Compost | 21
2. Joyful Frugality: Thoreau, Dickinson, and the Pleasures of Not Consuming | 51
3. The Problem with Preservation: Aesthetics and Sanctuary in
Catlin, Parkman, Erdrich, Melville, and Byatt | 85
4. Radical Pet Keeping: Crafts, Wilson, and Living with Others in the Anthropocene | 116
Coda. Embracing Green Temporalities: Indigenous Sustainabilities, Anglo-American Utopias | 147
Acknowledgments | 157
Notes | 161
Bibliography | 201
Index | 221
