Description
Book SynopsisA literary and cultural history of coralas an essential element of the marine ecosystem, a personal ornament, a global commodity, and a powerful political metaphorToday, coral and the human-caused threats to coral reef ecosystems symbolize our ongoing planetary crisis. In the nineteenth century, coral represented something else; as a recurring motif in American literature and culture, it shaped popular ideas about human society and politics. In Coral Lives, Michele Currie Navakas tells the story of coral as an essential element of the marine ecosystem, a cherished personal ornament, a global commodity, and a powerful political metaphor. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including works by such writers as Sarah Josepha Hale, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and George Washington Cable, Navakas shows how coral once helped Americans to recognize both the potential and the limits of interdependenceto imagine that their society could grow, like a coral reef, by sustain
Trade Review"[An] eloquent book. . . . Navakas integrates so many sources so well and with such a sharp eye on the complexities of race, cultural patterns, and global subjects that this book will become a ready model for scholarship in the environmental humanities."
---Katharine Anderson, H-Environment"Smart and fascinating. . . . To see coral through the eyes of the myriad sources brought together here is to be stunned by what we have lost, are losing—not merely coral itself, but our memory and knowledge of it, our relationship to the very past the coral lives of our ancestors built and bequeathed to us, trusting us to keep building, to keep alive, the surprises of life’s ceaseless becomings."
---Laura Dassow Walls, The Review of English Studies"
Coral Lives takes an unexpected approach to the environmental humanities. It does not trace a genealogy of coral as a vanishing object reflecting increasing anthropogenic damage to the natural world; Instead, it recollects meanings that are all but lost to us today. But it is the potential inspiration that inheres in the act of recovering lost narratives that gives this book value in the current crisis."
---Dana Luciano, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
