Sand, Water, Salt - Jada Ach

At different times, and to varying degrees, Americans have deemed these environments economically unproductive, incompatible with Anglo-American settlement, and/or highly unmanageable. Despite these varied complaints, the United States has also intensely desired these "wasteland" spaces, perceiving them as sources of both national wealth and elite pleasure. Sand, Water, Salt moves through a variety of novels, memoirs, and cultural artifacts from the 1880s to the 1920s, including L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Frank Norris's McTeague, Mary Hunter Austin's The Land of Little Rain, The Virginian by Owen Wister, Life among the Piutes by Sarah Winnemucca, as well as Jack London's The Sea-Wolf and Yone Noguchi's The American Diary of a Japanese Girl.

Ach ultimately asks what we gain by looking back at fin-de-siècle American literature with a queer, ecological justice-oriented eye, a particularly invigorating conversation that uniquely uses the elements as foci.

EAN: 9781682832455