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This book revaluates American literary culture through the lens of historical climate representations, as well as recent climate science.
List of contents
Introduction Michael Boyden; Part I. Climate and its Discontents: 1. The climate history of North America Dagomar Degroot; 2. Climate theories Lauren LaFauci; 3. Climate and civilization David N. Livingstone; 4. Climate and race Susan Scott Parrish; Part II. American Literary Climates: 5. Climate and American Indian literature Amy Hamilton; 6. Colonial climates Michael Boyden; 7. The degeneration thesis Timothy Sweet; 8. The state of the air in post-revolutionary America Julia Dauer; 9. The higher latitudes of the American renaissance Andrew McMurry; 10. Climate and the American west Sylvan Goldberg; 11. Fictions of health after miasma Don James McLaughlin; 12. Naturalism, regionalism, and climate (In)determinism Lynn Wardley; 13. American modernisms and climatology Matthew Griffiths; 14. Postmodern climates David Watson; 15. Frontiers of a shrinking world: recent American climate fiction Sarah Dimick; Part III. New Lines of Inquiry: 16. Climate and the environmental humanities Michael Ziser; 17. The anthropocenic sublime: a critique Jean-Baptiste Fressoz; 18. Climate and the new materialisms Hannes Bergthaller; 19. A match made in hell: climate change and neoliberalism Christian Parenti; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Michael Boyden is an associate professor of American Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. He is the author of Predicting the Past: The Paradoxes of American Literary History (2009). He has edited several journal issues, most recently an issue of Early American Literature on the 'New Natural History' (2019). Boyden has also edited two collected volumes, Tales of Transit Narrative Migrant Spaces in Transatlantic Perspective (with Hans Krabbendam and Liselotte Vandenbussche, 2013) and Reverberations of Revolution: Political Upheaval Seen from Afar (1750-1850) (with Elizabeth Amann, forthcoming). He is now working on a new monograph, provisionally entitled Climate and Sensibility in the American Tropics.
