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Wild Abandon: Postwar Literature Between Ecology And Authenticity, Alexander F. Menrisky
Wild Abandon: Postwar Literature Between Ecology And Authenticity, Alexander F. Menrisky
Theses and Dissertations--English
Wild Abandon traces a literary and cultural history of late twentieth-century appeals to dissolution, the moment at which a text seems to erase its subject’s sense of selfhood in natural environs. I argue that such appeals arose in response to a prominent yet overlooked interaction between discourses of ecology and authenticity following the rise and fall of the American New Left in the 1960s and 70s. This conjunction inspired certain intellectuals and activists to celebrate the ecological concept of interconnectivity as the most authentic basis of subjectivity in political, philosophical, spiritual, and literary writings. As I argue, dissolution represents a …