Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology

The American wilderness narrative has persisted despite the rise of ecological science by combining it with ideas from psychoanalysis and identity-based social movements. Alexander Menrisky argues that writers have dramatized and critiqued this tendency, undermining the concept of authenticity and granting insight into alternative histories of identity and environment.

\n Format: Hardback
\n Length: 290 pages
\n Publication date: 17 December 2020
\n Publisher: Cambridge University Press
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The American wilderness narrative, which distinguishes nature from culture, has endured remarkably despite the rise of ecological science, which emphasizes the interconnectedness of these spheres. Wild Abandon explores how ecology's interaction with radical politics of authenticity in the twentieth century has preserved that narrative in altered form. As ecology gained political momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, many environmentalists combined it with ideas borrowed from psychoanalysis and various identity-based social movements. The result was an identity politics of ecology that framed ecology itself as an authentic identity position repressed by cultural forms, including social differences and even selfhood.

Through readings of texts by Edward Abbey, Simon Ortiz, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Jon Krakauer, among others, Alexander Menrisky argues that writers have both dramatized and critiqued this tendency, undermining the concept of authenticity altogether and granting insight into alternative histories of identity and environment.

\n Weight: 558g\n
Dimension: 159 x 236 x 25 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9781108842563\n \n