Ruin and Resilience

Daniel Spoth is associate professor of literature at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. His writing has appeared in ELH, Journal of Ecocriticism, and Mississippi Quarterly, among other publications.

"Spoth's readings of a range of southern texts show us that one step beyond (or under) the patina of garden or arcadia or paradise there is its ominous reversal. The metaphor of the U.S. South as a place to escape to is as problematic as it ever was, more so in Spoth's Anthropocene framework. He is one of a generation of critics warning that it's time to wake up from the spell of magical thinking."--Michael Kreyling, author of The South That Wasn't There: Postsouthern Memory and History "With Ruin and Resilience, Daniel Spoth is taking ecocriticism south to productive places: road literature, food writing, disaster narrative, science fiction and climate fiction, and the rich archive that is the poetry of Natasha Trethewey. Along the way, he seeks to extricate southern environmental studies from the dead ends of white melancholy and nostalgia--the fetishization of ruin--and to direct it toward the hard-earned resilience exhibited by generations of southerners who have known environmental risk, loss, and injustice firsthand. With this fine study, Spoth maps out a southern ecocriticism for the Anthropocene era."--Jay Watson, author of William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity