Reading Aridity in Western American Literature

Jada Ach is a lecturer for the leadership and integrative studies program at Arizona State University.Gary Reger is Hobart professor of classical languages at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsForeword: Desertification by Tom LynchIntroduction: The Dry Time by Jada Ach and Gary RegerPart I: Eco-Identities and Environmental Belonging in Arid AmericaChapter 1: Imagined Deserts, Planned Communities, and Escape Pods in the American West by Amy T. HamiltonChapter 2: Aridity, Individualism, and Paradox in Elmer Kelton’s The Time it Never Rained by Quinn GroverChapter 3: Desert Haunting: A Gothic Reading of Arturo Islas’ The Rain God by Cordelia BarreraChapter 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. HernandezPart II: Desert Remains: Roads, Dams, and Discarded PianosChapter 5: Desert Roads, “Construction Men,” and Infrastructural Impulses in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House by Jada AchChapter 6: “It was the river”: Indigenous Anti-Dam Literature of the Great American Desert by Holly Jean Richard and Paul FormisanoChapte

Rich, varied, and deeply engaged, this volume does urgent and exciting work, illuminating the desert West’s cultural and ecological complexity, revealing the environmental costs of its colonization and settlement, and offering creative strategies for promoting environmental awareness. An essential contribution to the fields of Western American and ecocritical literary studies.