Ruin and Resilience - (Southern Literary Studies) by Daniel Spoth (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In Ruin and Resilience, Daniel Spoth confronts why the environmental stories told about the US South curve inevitably toward tragic plotlines. Studying over a dozen works of postbellum southern literature and cinema, Spoth's analysis winds from John Muir's walking journey across the war-torn South, through the troubling of southern environmentalism's modernity by Faulkner and Hurston, past the accounts of its acceleration in Welty and O'Connor, and finally into the present, uncovering how the tragic eco-narrative is transformed by contemporary southern food studies, climate fiction, and speculative fiction. Phrased as a reaction to the rising temperatures and swelling sea levels in the South, this ecocritical project conceptualizes an environmental ethos for the southern United States that takes account of its fundamentally vulnerable status and navigates the space between its reactionary politics and its ecological failures. Environmentally centered approaches to the South, according to Spoth, are poised between competing narratives of fatalistic ruin and optimistic yet flawed resilience, creating an uncertain future for the region that is deeply inflected by longstanding patterns of race, class, and gender-based inequality in both its formation and perpetuation. The US South has often been neglected by ecocriticism and environmental humanities scholarship. Ruin and Resilience reexamines the South in light of the dominant environmental narratives that have defined the region, charting their origins and their consequences"--

Book Synopsis

In Ruin and Resilience, Daniel Spoth confronts why the environmental stories told about the U.S. South curve inevitably toward distressing plotlines. Examining more than a dozen works of postbellum literature and cinema, Spoth's analysis winds from John Muir's walking journey across the war-torn South, through the troubling of southern environmentalism's modernity by Faulkner and Hurston, past the accounts of its acceleration in Welty and O'Connor, and finally into the present, uncovering how the tragic econarrative is transformed by contemporary food studies, climate fiction, and speculative tales inspired by the region.

Phrased as a reaction to the rising temperatures and swelling sea levels in the South, Ruin and Resilience conceptualizes an environmental, ecocritical ethos for the southern United States that takes account of its fundamentally vulnerable status and navigates the space between its reactionary politics and its ecological failures.

Review Quotes

"Spoth's readings of a range of southern texts show us that one step beyond (or under) the patina of garden or arcadia or paradise there is its ominous reversal. The metaphor of the U.S. South as a place to escape to is as problematic as it ever was, more so in Spoth's Anthropocene framework. He is one of a generation of critics warning that it's time to wake up from the spell of magical thinking."--Michael Kreyling, author of The South That Wasn't There: Postsouthern Memory and History

"With Ruin and Resilience, Daniel Spoth is taking ecocriticism south to productive places: road literature, food writing, disaster narrative, science fiction and climate fiction, and the rich archive that is the poetry of Natasha Trethewey. Along the way, he seeks to extricate southern environmental studies from the dead ends of white melancholy and nostalgia--the fetishization of ruin--and to direct it toward the hard-earned resilience exhibited by generations of southerners who have known environmental risk, loss, and injustice firsthand. With this fine study, Spoth maps out a southern ecocriticism for the Anthropocene era."--Jay Watson, author of William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity

About the Author

Daniel Spoth is associate professor of literature at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. His writing has appeared in ELH, Journal of Ecocriticism, and Mississippi Quarterly, among other publications.