Energy and Economy in American Literature

Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-1-009-87629-2
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 278 Seiten

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture

This ambitious history of industrial and cultural revolution illuminates the formation of a new idiom of energy and economy in nineteenth-century America. In 1851, Ralph Waldo Emerson made an arduous journey to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, in a series of lectures, he articulated modern ideas of industrial power, the soul's economy, and a value system premised on a new set of prime movers, fossil fuels. Emerson asked a practical question: 'How shall I live?' His response was to create a mythic language centered on the energy-and-economy dialectic. This book vividly shows how other authors, from Catharine Beecher, who laid the groundwork for the environmental canon, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who poeticized labor, to Henry Adams and Edith Wharton, as well as conservationists, homemakers, and coal miners, built on Emerson's 'practical question' to give fresh purpose to human existence in a radically altered world.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ackerman, Alan

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Burning ideas; 2. Emerson in Pittsburgh; 3. Apocalyptic rumblings: domestic economy and environmentalism; 4. Henry Adams on the track of energy; 5. Edith Wharton's aesthetic resources; 6. Black labor, coal, and the soul's economy.

Über Autor(innen)

Ackerman, Alan
Alan Ackerman is Professor of English at the University of Toronto, the author of numerous books, including Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America (Yale University Press, 2011), a poet, and a teacher of innovative courses on trees and literature in environmental studies.