Reading Aridity in Western American Literature focuses on literature – fiction, film, non-fiction, and travel literature arid the American West. Treating “classic” authors, ignored works, and books and films by non-Americans, the volume employs ecocritical and/or new materialist approaches to provide a framework for illuminating the desert spaces.

In literary and cinematic representations, deserts often betoken collapse and dystopia. Reading Aridity in Western American Literature offers readings of literature set in the American Southwest from ecocritical and new materialist perspectives. This book explores the diverse epistemologies, histories, relationships, futures, and possibilities that emerge from the representation of American deserts in fiction, film, and literary art, and traces the social, cultural, economic, and biotic narratives that foreground deserts, prompting us to reconsider new, provocative modes of human/nonhuman engagement in arid ecogeographies.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword: Desertification by Tom Lynch

Introduction: The Dry Time by Jada Ach and Gary Reger

Part I: Eco-Identities and Environmental Belonging in Arid America

Chapter 1: Imagined Deserts, Planned Communities, and Escape Pods in the American West by Amy T. Hamilton

Chapter 2: Aridity, Individualism, and Paradox in Elmer Kelton’s The Time it Never Rained by Quinn Grover

Chapter 3: Desert Haunting: A Gothic Reading of Arturo Islas’ The Rain God by Cordelia Barrera

Chapter 4: Imagining the Southwest in Willa Cather’s Frontier Novels: Settler Colonialism in The Song of the Lark, The Professor’s House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop by Zachary R. Hernandez

Part II: Desert Remains: Roads, Dams, and Discarded Pianos

Chapter 5: Desert Roads, “Construction Men,” and Infrastructural Impulses in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House by Jada Ach

Chapter 6: “It was the river”: Indigenous Anti-Dam Literature of the Great American Desert by Holly Jean Richard and Paul Formisano

Chapter 7: The Desert as Dumping Ground in Popular Imagination by Jennifer Dawes

Part III: Envisioning the Desert from Outside the West

Chapter 8: Trinitite, Turquoise, and Rattlesnakes: Envisioning the (De)Nuclearized Desert in the Works of Leslie Marmon Silko and Kyoko Hayashi by Kyoko Matsunaga

Chapter 9: Color, Place, and Memory in Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes by Celina Osuna

Chapter 10: French Travelers in the Arid Southwest by Gary Reger

Conclusion: Desert Dwelling by Ron Broglio

About the Contributors

Index