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Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction

Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction Paperback / softback - 2010 - 1st Edition

by Matthew J. C. Cella

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  • Paperback

Description

Paperback / softback. New. At the core of this nuanced book is the question that ecocritics have been debating for decades: what is the relationship between aesthetics and activism, between art and community? By using a pastoral lens to examine ten fictional narratives that chronicle the dialogue between human culture and nonhuman nature on the Great Plains, Matthew Cella explores literary treatments of a succession of abrupt cultural transitions from the Euroamerican conquest of the "Indian wilderness" in the nineteenth century to the Buffalo Commons phenomenon in the twentieth. By charting the shifting meaning of land use and biocultural change in the region, he posits this bad land-the arid West-as a crucible for the development of the human imagination. Each chapter deals closely with two novels that chronicle the same crisis within the Plains community. Cella highlights, for example, how Willa Cather reconciles her persistent romanticism with a growing disillusionment about the future of rural Nebraska, how Tillie Olsen and Frederick Manfred approach the tragedy of the Dust Bowl with strikingly similar visions, and how Annie Proulx and Thomas King use the return of the buffalo as the centrepiece of a revised mythology of the Plains as a palimpsest defined by layers of change and response. By illuminating these fictional quests for wholeness on the Great Plains, Cella leads us to understand the intricate interdependency of people and the places they inhabit. Cella uses the term "pastoralism" in its broadest sense to mean a mode of thinking that probes the relationship between nature and culture: a discourse concerned with human engagement-material and nonmaterial-with the nonhuman community. In all ten novels discussed in this book, pastoral experience-the encounter with the Beautiful-leads to a renewed understanding of the integral connection between human and nonhuman communities. Propelling this tradition of bad land pastoralism are an underlying faith in the beauty of wholeness that comes from inhabiting a continuously changing biocultural landscape and a recognition of the inevitability of change. The power of story and language to shape the direction of that change gives literary pastoralism the potential to support an alternative series of ideals based not on escape but on stewardship: community, continuity, and commitment.
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Details

  • Title Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction
  • Author Matthew J. C. Cella
  • Binding Paperback / softback
  • Edition number 1st
  • Edition 1
  • Condition New
  • Pages 254
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher University of Iowa Press
  • Date 2010-08
  • Features Bibliography, Index
  • Bookseller's Inventory # A9781587299070
  • ISBN 9781587299070 / 1587299070
  • Weight 0.79 lbs (0.36 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.7 in (22.35 x 14.99 x 1.78 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects Place (Philosophy) in literature, Pastoral literature, American - History and
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2010005241
  • Dewey Decimal Code 813.009

Media reviews

Citations

  • Choice, 02/01/2011, Page 0
  • Reference and Research Bk News, 11/01/2010, Page 300

About the author

Matthew Cella is a visiting assistant professor of English at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania. He has been both managing editor and book review editor for "MELUS," the journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.