This essay argues that changes in American energy infrastructure from carbon-based power plants to distributed, renewable energy networks precipitate changes in American literary regionalism. Examining recent regional fiction including Jay Tyrell’s Wind Army, Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Tamarisk Hunter,” and Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker, I argue that stories of climate-change...
This paper asks whether animals can ever break out of anthropocentric value systems in literary narratives and, if so, what critical methods might be enlisted to reveal a literary animal’s independent agency. Examining the representation of a gray wolf in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Crossing, it concludes that the animal’s...
This essay charts the emergence of “rugged consumers” in contemporary American culture: skilled laborers who confront the disappearance of manufacturing jobs during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the accompanying sense of labor’s marginality in American society. Although they are alienated from sites of industrial productivity, rugged consumers...