Research Catalog

Agrotopias an American literary history of sustainability

Title: Agrotopias [electronic resource] : an American literary history of sustainability / Abby L. Goode.
Author: Goode, Abby L.
Publication: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2022.

Available Online

Details

Description

1 online resource (pages cm)

Summary

"In this book, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and its enduring connections to racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as Martin Delany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Walt Whitman worried about unsustainable conditions such as population growth and plantation slavery. In response, they imagined 'agrotopias'-sustainable societies unaffected by the nation's agricultural and population crises-elsewhere. Though seemingly progressive, these agrotopian visions depicted selective breeding and racial 'improvement' as the path to environmental stability. In this fascinating study, Goode uncovers an early sustainability rhetoric interested in shaping, just as much as sustaining, the American population"--

Uniform Title

Agrotopias (Online)

Alternative Title

Agrotopias (Online)

Subject

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Access (note)

Access restricted to authorized users.

Contents

No rural bowl of milk: unsustainability and the demographic agrarian ideal -- Gothic fertility and other tropical nightmares: Jefferson, Crèvecoeur, Sansay -- African agrotopias: sustaining Black nationalism beyond U.S. borders -- Sustainable sprawl: Whitman's eugenic agrarianism -- Asexual sustainability in "Herland" -- Agrotopian legacies.

LCCN