Agrotopias
An American Literary History of Sustainability
By Abby L. Goode
294 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 2 halftones
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6982-3
Published: September 2022 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-6981-6
Published: September 2022 -
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-6983-0
Published: August 2022
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- Hardcover $99.00
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Showing how ideas about race and reproduction were central to early sustainability thinking, Goode unearths an alternative environmental archive that ranges from gothic novels to Black nationalist manifestos, from Waco, Texas, to the West Indies, from city tenements to White House kitchen gardens. Exposing the eugenic foundations of some of our most well-regarded environmental traditions, this book compels us to reexamine the benevolence of American environmental thought.
About the Author
Abby L. Goode is assistant professor of English at Plymouth State University.
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Reviews
“A valuable contribution to understanding the history of American environmental thought through its literary output during the 19th and early 20th centuries. . . . Recommended.”—CHOICE
“A stellar argument . . . an ambitious, important intervention in sustainability rhetoric over a 300-year period.”—ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
"A significant contribution to a growing field of studies on pre–twentieth century antecedents to contemporary sustainability rhetoric and practices. Agrotopias highlights the ways that U.S. agrarianism has been entangled from the beginning with nativist and eugenic assumptions about population control and racial purity."—William Gleason, Princeton University
“Goode attends to the racial dimension of American sustainability discourse and the literature of agriculture and that has long been missing from scholarly work on the subject. An important intervention in the history of American agrarianism.”—Timothy Sweet, West Virginia University