Jones Reclaiming John Steinbeck

Writing for the Future of Humanity
Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-1-108-94594-3
Verlag: Cambridge University Press
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 0 Seiten

John Steinbeck is a towering figure in twentieth-century American literature; yet he remains one of our least understood writers. This major reevaluation of Steinbeck by Gavin Jones uncovers a timely thinker who confronted the fate of humanity as a species facing climate change, environmental crisis, and a growing divide between the powerful and the marginalized. Driven by insatiable curiosity, Steinbeck's work crossed a variety of borders – between the United States and the Global South, between human and nonhuman lifeforms, between science and the arts, and between literature and film – to explore the transformations in consciousness necessary for our survival on a precarious planet. Always seeking new forms to express his ecological and social vision of human interconnectedness and vulnerability, Steinbeck is a writer of urgent concern for the twenty-first century, even as he was haunted by the legacies of racism and injustice in the American West.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jones, Gavin

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction: Loving and Hating Steinbeck; 1. Short Stories in School and Lab:'Tularecito' and 'The Snake'; 2. Drought, Climate, and Race in the West: To a God Unknown; 3. Race and Revision: 'The Vigilante' and 'Johnny Bear'; 4. Becoming Animal: Theories of Mind in The Red Pony; 5. What Is It Like to Be a Plant?: 'The Chrysanthemums' and 'The White Quail'; 6. On Not Being a Modernist: Disability and Performance in Of Mice and Men; 7. Emergence and Failure: The Middleness of The Grapes of Wrath; 8. Borderlands: Extinction and the New World Outlook in Sea of Cortez; 9. Mexican Revolutions: The Forgotten Village, The Pearl, and the Global South; Epilogue: The Aftertaste of Cannery Row; Notes; Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Jones, Gavin
Gavin Jones is the Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University, where he has taught American literature since 1999. He is the author of Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (University of California Press, 1999), American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in US Literature, 1840-1945 (Princeton University Press, 2008), and Failure and the American Writer: A Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2014).