WILD ABANDON: Postwar Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology
Wild Abandon addresses the literary consequences of what I term the identity politics of ecology, a position that arose through the interaction between the countercultural discourses of ecology and authenticity in the 1960s and 70s. This intellectual trend takes the ecological concept of interconnectivity as the most authentic basis of selfhood. As such, it advocates an essentialist and universalist identification with the ecosystem writ large. I argue that literary representations of dissolution—when a text seems to embrace the identity politics of ecology and erase its subject’s sense of selfhood in natural environs—in fact critique this idea by foregrounding an unsurpassable representational tension between self and ecosystem. Assuming an anti-essentialist stance, all the texts I study acknowledge ecological interconnectivity as a universal condition but maintain the necessity of culturally mediated and individually constructed identity positions from which to recognize that condition.
