Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability

A valuable contribution to understanding the history of American environmental thought through its literary output during the 19th and early 20th centuries. . . . Recommended."-CHOICE

A stellar argument . . . an ambitious, important intervention in sustainability rhetoric over a 300-year period."-ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

Compelling and astute. . . . [A] well-written, deftly argued, and much needed reconsideration of the development of nineteenth-century American agricultural and environmental imagination."-New England Quarterly

An important addition to a broader wave of scholarship . . . [that] provide[s] readers with an understanding of how the material, political, and cultural components of American agrarian thought took hold in nineteenth-century society."-H-Environment

Rich and compelling. . . . [A]n essential intervention into the history of US environmental thought, one that insists we reconsider the simple progressive goodness typically accorded to agrarianism and its legacies."-American Literary History

In this important, well-executed study . . . Goode has chosen a fascinating combination of literary works to consider. . . . In her consistently striking readings of these texts, Goode traces the nuanced yet potent ways in which sustainability rhetoric (and its whole conceptual scaffolding) evolved from the Revolutionary Era through the Progressive Era."-Early American Literature