This book intersects environmental humanities, critical theory, and literary criticism with the Desert Southwest. It explores the fullness of desert places with regard to cultures, borders, and languages as well as nonhuman forces and elements like heat, distance, and light. Dispelling the dominant notion of desert as void, it sets a stage to suit the polyvocality and abundance of desert places.In working against static representations of the Desert Southwest that have persisted th...

In literary and cinematic representations, deserts often betoken collapse and dystopia. Reading Aridity in Western American Literature offers readings of literature set in the American Southwest from ecocritical and new materialist perspectives. This book explores the diverse epistemologies, histories, relationships, futures, and possibilities that emerge from the representation of American deserts in fiction, film, and literary art, and traces the social, cultural, economic, and ...

Storied Deserts makes a crucial and critical intervention in the field of environmental humanities by showcasing an emerging body of research on desert places from around the world.Deserts, despite dominant stereotypes of wasteland and barrenness, are culturally and ecologically abundant places. This edited volume sets out to reimagine the world’s desert places and the very concept of "the desert" itself, taking a boldly interdisciplinary and multicultural approach. Author...