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Chapter 20 - War and Ecocriticism

from Part III - New Lines of Inquiry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2021

By
Laura Wright
Edited by
Jennifer Haytock
Jennifer Haytock
Affiliation:
State University College, Brockport, New York
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Summary

This essay links the environmental resistance embodied by Edward Abbey’s Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang after the Vietnam War and the speculatively fictional future of Octavia Butler’s Olamina’s ecofeminist resistance (The Parable of the Talents) to a war that seems all too imminent in the contemporary US, a place where climate change denial is political policy and the interests of fossil fuel magnates matter more than the lives of individual citizens. This essay explores how American ecocriticism interrogates and informs our conceptions of war, whom we are fighting, and the ways that war generates environmental exigency.

Keywords

US war and ecocriticismEdward AbbeyOctavia Butler
Type
Chapter
Information
War and American Literature , pp. 301 - 314
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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