Ruin and Resilience: Southern Literature and the Environment by Daniel Spoth (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Ruin and Resilience: Southern Literature and the Environment by Daniel Spoth
• Weston Twardowski

Ruin and Resilience: Southern Literature and the Environment. By Daniel Spoth. Southern Literary Studies. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. xii, 202. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7936-9.)

It is to our detriment, Daniel Spoth persuasively argues, that the South remains something of a conceptual afterthought in environmental imaginations. Spoth’s contention is that directing our attention to the South challenges ecocriticism to think more broadly about the kind of spaces (and the people who inhabit those spaces) we imagine and theorize about in our study of the environment. By approaching the South as a landscape of natural and man-made ruins, Spoth challenges romantic notions of ruination and instead asks us to consider why and how this framing exists. Throughout Ruin and Resilience: Southern Literature and the Environment, Spoth reveals the ways that southerners resist ruination through strategies of resilience. In marrying ruin and resilience, Spoth pushes us to see the South not as a space of ruin, but as a living, ongoing place where resilient people continue to invent stories and means of survival.

Across five chapters, Spoth moves through case studies from literature and film ranging across the nineteenth century to the present. In mixing authors and eras, the argument demonstrates patterns of ruination in southern culture with accompanying resilience narratives and how these ideas define our conception of southern environmentalism. The first chapter takes examples by John Muir, William Faulkner, and Natasha Trethewey to establish the larger concept of southern ruination. The subsequent chapters establish patterns of resilience across different places and times, in each case exploring both ruin and how groups resist the ruination through resilience. In the second chapter, highways and infrastructures that cut across the region are directly connected to urban sprawl and the collapse of traditional cultural lifeways, offering a much-needed addition to ecocritical understanding of southern environments and highlighting an attention to environmental justice that Spoth develops across the book. The third chapter powerfully critiques the romanticization of southern foodways, noting the deep relationship between class and poverty, race, and food culture.

The fourth and fifth chapters investigate disasters and climate change, respectively. These chapters mark a change in the book, which moves to a more expansive and largely contemporary reading of environmental violence that points to the unequal distribution of harm left by disasters. The final chapter moves beyond the present and into the postapocalyptic through a focus on the ways southerners might return and establish new Souths in the wake of cataclysm. Cumulatively, the three final chapters demonstrate an understanding of the impermanence and danger that exist throughout a contemporary South that is rapidly becoming uninhabitable in many places. The conclusion calls for a turn away from resilience (a term often disliked by local activists) [End Page 632] and critiques the notion as insufficient. The argument is compelling and makes me hopeful Spoth’s future work will develop this line of thought further and provide models that move us past resilience and toward new ways of imagining more equitable futures.

The foregrounding of environmental justice throughout Ruin and Resilience is significant and a strong model for other ecocritical projects. Part of Spoth’s goal is to turn ecocriticism’s eye southward—but this goal would be better accomplished through incorporating more contemporary ecocritical theory, which could have both bolstered Spoth’s claims and better invited nonsouthern scholars to engage with the ideas presented. However, the geographic and temporal reach of the work and its attention throughout to a justice-centric lens make Ruin and Resilience an important contribution to the field and a model of how ecocritical work can think about the populations most damaged by the legacy of environmental harms. This highly readable new book will interest scholars of ecocriticism and environmental justice, especially those thinking about the literature and cultures of the South.

Weston Twardowski Rice University Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...