Awards

• Short-listed for ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism 2010 (Canada)

Overview

"Writing in Dust is the first sustained study of prairie Canadian literature from an ecocritical perspective. Drawing on recent scholarship in environmental theory and criticism, Jenny Kerber considers the ways in which prairie writers have negotiated processes of ecological and cultural change in the region from the early twentieth century to the present. The book begins by proposing that current environmental problems in the prairie region can be understood by examining the longstanding tendency to describe its diverse terrain in dualistic termsâeither as an idyllic natural space or as an irredeemable wasteland. It inquires into the sources of stories that naturalize ecological prosperity and hardship and investigates how such narratives have been deployed from the period of colonial settlement to the present. It then considers the ways in which works by both canonical and more recent writers ranging from Robert Stead, W.O. Mitchell, and Margaret Laurence to Tim Lilburn, Louise Halfe, and Thomas King consistently challenge these dualistic landscape myths, proposing alternatives for the development of more ecologically just and sustainable relationships among people and between humans and their physical environments. Writing in Dust asserts that ""reading environmentally"" can help us to better understand a host of issues facing prairie inhabitants today, including the environmental impacts of industrial agriculture, resource extraction, climate change, shifting urbanârural demographics, the significance of Indigenous understandings of humanânature relationships, and the complex, often contradictory meanings of eco-cultural metaphors of alien/invasiveness, hybridity, and wildness."

Full Product Details

9781554582181

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Reviews

This is the right book at the right time. Writing in Dust convincingly demonstrates the importance of including the arts in discussions of sustainability. Jenny Kerber s scholarship, sensitive and rigorous, rereads familiar texts in fresh ways and makes the field of prairie literary scholarship newly relevant. - Alison Calder, University of Manitoba, co-editor of History, Literature, and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies (2005), editor of Desire Never Leaves: The Poetry of Tim Lilburn (WLU Press, 2006)

Author Information

Jenny Kerber teaches in the areas of Canadian and American literature, literary theory, and environmental criticism in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her essays on Canadian literary and environmental topics have appeared in Canadian Poetry , Canadian Literature , Essays on Canadian Writing , and Green Letters . This is her first book.

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