Overview
- Provides an in-depth study of the African American environmental literary tradition
- Draws attention to archival material and a range of under-researched texts
- Enables fresh perspectives on canonical African American authors of the antebellum period
- This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access
Part of the book series: Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment (LCE)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Foundations: Antebellum African American Environmental Knowledge
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Front Matter
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Transformations: African American Environmental Knowledge from Reconstruction to Modernity
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This open access book suggests new ways of reading nineteenth-century African American literature environmentally. Combining insights from ecocriticism, African American studies, and Foucauldian theory, Matthias Klestil examines forms of environmental knowledge in African American writing ranging from antebellum slave narratives and pamphlets to Charlotte Forten’s journals, Booker T. Washington’s autobiographies, and Charles W. Chesnutt’s short fiction. The volume highlights how literary forms of environmental knowledge in the African American tradition were shaped by the histories of slavery and race, mainstream environmental writing traditions, and African American forms of expression and intertextuality. Turning to the Underground Railroad, debates over education and home-building, and the aesthetics of the pastoral and the georgic, Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature provides an original perspective on the African American ecoliterary traditionthat uncovers new facets of canonical and understudied texts and offers new directions for ecocriticism and African American studies.
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Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Matthias Klestil is Postdoctoral Assistant in American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. His research focuses on African American literature and culture, ecocriticism, and narrative theory.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature
Authors: Matthias Klestil
Series Title: Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82102-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-82101-2Published: 21 April 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-82104-3Published: 21 April 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-82102-9Published: 20 April 2023
Series ISSN: 2946-3157
Series E-ISSN: 2946-3165
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VIII, 307
Topics: North American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Literary Theory, African American Culture, History, general, Ethnicity, Class, Gender and Crime