Against Sustainability responds to contemporary environmental crisis not by seeking the origins of U.S. environmental problems, but by returning to the nineteenth-century literature and cultural contexts that gave rise to many of our most familiar environmental solutions. Chapters explore sustainability, recycling, frugality, preservation, radical pet keeping, zero waste, and utopianism Introduction: The Unlikely Environmentalisms of Nineteenth-Century American Literature -- 1. Recycling Fantasies: Whitman, Clifton, and the Dream of Compost -- 2. Joyful Frugality: Thoreau, Dickinson, and the Pleasures of Not Consuming -- 3. The Problem with Preservation: Aesthetics and Sanctuary in Catlin, Parkman, Erdrich, Melville, and Byatt -- 4. Radical Pet Keeping: Crafts, Wilson, and Living with Others in the Anthropocene -- Coda. Embracing Green Temporalities: Indigenous Sustainabilities, Anglo-American Utopias.
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