Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of Nebraska Press
Publishing:1st May '26
£21.59 was £23.99
This title is due to be published on 1st May, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West contributes to discussions in the environmental humanities and western U.S. studies about how we read past cultural history in the light of our determined yet unknown future under climate catastrophe. Examining an eclectic but interrelated and interdisciplinary range of photographs, films, and novels of the West; Western historiography; geological science; Tony Kushner's Angels in America; the Los Angeles freeway system and the city's layered temporalities; and the long poem form among contemporary Indigenous poets, William R. Handley argues that artists within mostly twentieth-century settler cultures saw on past horizons of the West premonitions of catastrophe—without, of course, knowing what their civilization was doing to the atmosphere and what that portended for the planet's future. The possibilities and limits of their artistic forms, Handley shows us, offer a way for us to find hope in the wreckage of the past and to forge a future grounded in environmental realism.
"William Handley is one of our most brilliant and provocative critics. In this book about the fraught history and perception of the American West, he uses close readings of texts, films, and paintings to understand how we've arrived at our present catastrophe, and what those who experienced and described it in the past can tell us about how we might still be able to face our future. This is a capacious, erudite, and timely book."—Keith Gessen, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men and A Terrible Country
"Integrating Western American literary and cultural studies with the climate change scholarship in the environmental humanities, Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West offers a timely and powerful exploration of how key literary, visual arts, cinematic, and architectural texts produced during the last century have represented interlocking ecological, political, and cultural crises of the Anthropocene. With intellectual rigor, lucid prose, and interdisciplinary finesse, William Handley's brilliant close readings explore how his selected texts—these ranging from Clarence King to Mark Klett; from Zane Grey and Willa Cather to Christopher Isherwood and Tony Kushner—both obscure and illuminate the past environmental catastrophes that continue to shape our present crises, as well as excavate another possible 'horizon,' that of hope."—Stephen Tatum, author of Unhomely Wests: Essays from A to Z
"A searching exploration of how twentieth-century artistic media, from novels, poems, and plays to re-photography and the transportation palimpsest of Los Angeles, expose the intimations of catastrophe and decolonization that haunt white settler colonialism. For William Handley, the American West is a palimpsest wherein the deep time of geology challenges and supersedes settler hegemonies and where ever-present catastrophe opens settler time to other worlds, 'between nihilism and paradise.'"—Stephanie LeMenager, coeditor of Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century
ISBN: 9781496246103
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
322 pages