Exhausted Ecologies
Modernism and Environmental Recovery

Modern literature and environmentalism combined ecology, psychology, and aesthetics to restore communal well-being to the United Kingdom after world war.

Andrew Kalaidjian (Author)

9781108477918, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 January 2020

342 pages, 13 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.47 kg

'In his introduction, Kalaidjian expresses the need for both modernism and ecocriticism to advance each other and not “simply reinterpret one through the other's lens”. Exhausted Ecologies therefore has much to offer to those studying Europe and its empires, environmental historians, modernist literary critics, and ecocritical scholars alike. Kalaidjian's work here overall is timely in light of the increasing threat of climate disaster, as well as a fascinating view into the connections between modernist literature and the beginnings of modern environmentalism.' Leanna Lostoski-Ho, EuropeNow

This book evaluates twentieth century British and Global Anglophone literature in relation to the growth of ecological thinking in the United Kingdom. Restless modernists such as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Jean Rhys developed a literary aesthetic of slowness and immediacy to critique the exhausting and dehumanizing aspects of modern urban and industrial life. At the same time, environmental groups such as the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves and the Smoke Abatement League moved from economic registers of 'value' and 'trust' to more cultural terms of 'recovery' and 'regeneration' to position nature as a healing force in the postwar era. Through a variety of literary, scientific, and political texts, an environmental movement emerged alongside the fast, fragmented, and traumatic aspects of modernization in order to sustain place and community in terms of lateral influence and ecological dependence.

Introduction: places of rest
1. Nature's reserves: rural exhaustion, inertia, and generative aesthetics
2. Urban environs: James Joyce and the politics of shared atmosphere
3. Waste lands: dark pastoral in T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Djuna Barnes
4. Uprooting empire: Jean Rhys and unrest in imperial centers
5. Decolonizing ecology: Chinua Achebe's new forms of unease
Conclusion: the limits of modernist regeneration.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]