Books published by University of Virginia Press

Explores the influence of landscape architecture, city planning, and parks management on American poetry to show how modernists engaged with the green worlds and social playgrounds created in the early twentieth century. Through a combination of ecocriticism, urban studies, and historical geography, this book unveils the neglected urban context for seemingly natural landscapes in modernist poems.

Clarence Glacken wrote one of the most important books on environmental issues published in the twentieth century. His magnum opus, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, first published in 1967, details the ways in which perceptions of the natural environment have profoundly influenced human enterprise over the centuries while, conversely, permitting humans to radically alter the Earth. Although Glacken did not publish a comparable book before his death in 1989, he did write a follow-up collection of essays-lost works now compiled at last in Genealogies of Environmentalism.This new volume comprises all of Glacken's unpublished writings to follow Traces and covers a broad temporal and geographic canvas, spanning the globe from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Each essay offers a brief intellectual biography of an important environmental thinker and addresses questions such as how many people the Earth can hold, what resources can sustain such populations, and where land for growth is located. This collection-carefully edited and annotated, and organized chronologically-will prove both a classic text and a springboard for further discussions on the history of environmental thought.

Disputing the claim that Algerian writing during the struggle against French colonial rule dealt almost exclusively with revolutionary themes, The Algerian New Novel shows how Algerian authors writing in French actively contributed to the experimental forms of the period, expressing a new age literarily as well as politically and culturally. Looking at canonical Algerian literature as part of the larger literary production in French during decolonization, Valrie K. Orlando considers how novels by Rachid Boudjedra, Mohammed Dib, Assia Djebar, Nabile Fars, Yamina Mechakra, and Kateb Yacine both influenced and were reflectors of the sociopolitical and cultural transformation that took place during this period in Algeria. Although their themes were rooted in Algeria, the avant-garde writing styles of these authors were influenced by early twentieth-century American modernists, the New Novelists of 1940s-50s France, and African American authors of the 1950s-60s. This complex mix of influences led Algerian writers to develop a unique modern literary aesthetic to express their world, a tradition of experimentation and fragmentation that still characterizes the work of contemporary Algerian francophone writers.

In this volume, the author reflects on anthropological uses of the concept of popular culture. He retraces how his explorations of popular culture in the Shaba region of Zaire, now the Congo, showed that classical culture theory did not account for large aspects of contemporary African life.

'Two men died the last week of June 1944.' 'Actually, three died...' 'But the third one didn't die, miraculously perhaps. Who knows? The three men were, of course, acquainted... When I say that the third one didn't die, I mean not the same week. How and why? If I told you now, you wouldn't understand this strange case any better....