Writing in Dust is the first sustained study of prairie Canadian
literature from an ecocritical perspective. Drawing on recent
scholarship in environmental theory and criticism, Jenny Kerber
considers the ways in which prairie writers have negotiated processes of
ecological and cultural change in the region from the early twentieth
century to the present.
The book begins by proposing that current environmental problems in the
prairie region can be understood by examining the longstanding tendency
to describe its diverse terrain in dualistic terms--either as an idyllic
natural space or as an irredeemable wasteland. It inquires into the
sources of stories that naturalize ecological prosperity and hardship
and investigates how such narratives have been deployed from the period
of colonial settlement to the present. It then considers the ways in
which works by both canonical and more recent writers ranging from
Robert Stead, W.O. Mitchell, and Margaret Laurence to Tim Lilburn,
Louise Halfe, and Thomas King consistently challenge these dualistic
landscape myths, proposing alternatives for the development of more
ecologically just and sustainable relationships among people and between
humans and their physical environments.
Writing in Dust asserts that "reading environmentally" can help us to
better understand a host of issues facing prairie inhabitants today,
including the environmental impacts of industrial agriculture, resource
extraction, climate change, shifting urban-rural demographics, the
significance of Indigenous understandings of human-nature relationships,
and the complex, often contradictory meanings of eco-cultural metaphors
of alien/invasiveness, hybridity, and wildness.
