Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature

Sarah Daw is Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature (EUP 2018), and numerous articles, including ‘The ‘dark ecology’ of the Bomb: Writing the Nuclear as a part of Nature in Cold War American Literature’, Dark Nature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Literature and Culture, ed. Richard J. Schneider (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), ‘“If he chooses to speak from these roots”: Entanglement and Uncertainty in Charles Olson’s “Quantum” Ecopoetics’, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 23.4 (2019), 350-366, ‘The Art and Science of Form: Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Olson and F. O. Matthiessen at Mid-century’, Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Science and Literature, ed. Priscilla Wald.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Ecocriticism and the Mid-Twentieth CenturyChapter 1. Attaining fana in Paul Bowles’s Infinite LandscapesChapter 2. Nature and the Nuclear Southwest: Peggy Pond Church and J. Robert OppenheimerChapter 3. The Influence of Chinese and Japanese Literature on J. D. Salinger’s Philosophy of NatureChapter 4. The Beat Ecologies of Allen Ginsberg and Jack KerouacChapter 5. Bifurcated Nature in Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America Conclusion: ‘Know that the Earth will Madonna the Bomb’Index

Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature redraws ecocritical thinking. The atomic age, it argues, changed ways of seeing 'Nature'. Throughout, Daw weaves delicate, though challenging, analyses of how 'ecological thought' is at play across a number of Cold War American writers not usually discussed by ecocritics.