Sand Water Salt

Jada Ach's scholarship in <i>Sand Water Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West 1880-1925</i> seeks to reevaluate the Progressive Era's environmental legacy. Taking an ecocritical approach to turn-of-the-century literature set in the American West Ach interrogates texts by asking what kinds of environmental national and cultural stories the elements have to tell about land and oceanic management. <i>Sand Water Salt</i> investigates managerial engagements with dynamic ecologies in three particular Western environments: the arid deserts the semiarid high plains and the Pacific Ocean. <p/>At different times and to varying degrees Americans have deemed these environments economically unproductive incompatible with Anglo-American settlement and/or highly unmanageable. Despite these varied complaints the United States has also intensely desired these wasteland spaces perceiving them as sources of both national wealth and elite pleasure. <i>Sand Water Salt</i> moves through a variety of novels memoirs and cultural artifacts from the 1880s to the 1920s including L. Frank Baum's <i>The Wonderful Wizard of Oz</i> Frank Norris's <i>McTeague</i> Mary Hunter Austin's <i>The Land of Little Rain</i> <i>The Virginian</i> by Owen Wister <i>Life among the Piutes</i> by Sarah Winnemucca as well as Jack London's <i>The Sea-Wolf</i> and Yone Noguchi's <i>The American Diary of a Japanese Girl</i>. <p/>Ach ultimately asks what we gain by looking back at <i>fin-de-si��cle</i> American literature with a queer ecological justice-oriented eye a particularly invigorating conversation that uniquely uses the elements as foci.