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The Environment and Literature of Moral Dilemmas
From Adam to Michael K
David Aberbach
- 224 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
The Environment and Literature of Moral Dilemmas
From Adam to Michael K
David Aberbach
About This Book
Exploring the literature of environmental moral dilemmas from the Hebrew Bible to modern times, this book argues the necessity of cross-disciplinary approaches to environmental studies, as a subject affecting everyone, in every aspect of life.
Moral dilemmas are central in the literary genre of protest against the effects of industry, particularly in Romantic literature and 'Condition of England' novels. Writers from the time of the Industrial Revolution to the present—including William Blake, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, T.S. Eliot, John Steinbeck, George Orwell, and J.M. Coetzee—follow the Bible in seeing environmental problems in moral terms, as a consequence of human agency. The issues raised by these and other writers—including damage to the environment and its effects on health and quality of life, particularly on the poor; economic conflicts of interest; water and air pollution, deforestation, and the environmental effects of war—are fundamentally the same today, making their works a continual source of interest and insight.
Sketching a brief literary history on the impact of human behavior on the environment, this volume will be of interest to readers researching environmental studies, literary studies, religious studies and international development, as well as a useful resource to scientists and readers of the Arts.
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1 The environment and the betrayal of the covenant
All around him seeds were swelling and shoots were growing, cracking the surface of the plain, driven upwards by their need for warmth and light. The sap flowed upwards and spilled over in soft whispers; the sound of germinating seeds rose and swelled to form a kiss. Again, and again, and ever more clearly, as if they too were rising towards the sunlight, his comrades kept tapping away. Beneath the blazing rays of the sun, in that morning of new growth, the countryside rang with song, as its belly swelled with a black and avenging army of men, germinating slowly in its furrows, growing upwards in readiness for harvests to come, until one day soon their ripening would burst open the earth itself.11
They were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea. All their meagre breasts panted together, the violently dilated nostrils quivered, the eyes stared stonily uphill. They passed me within six inches, without a glance, with that complete death-like indifference of unhappy savages… I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly… Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing, in an intolerable and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested its forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence.12
… heaven and earth was teeming around them, and how should this cease? They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds’ nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and interrelations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn away. The young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs of the men who saw it. They took the udder of the cows, the cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men. They mounted their horses, and held life between the grip of their knees, they harnessed their horses at the wagon, and, with hand on the bridle-rings, drew the heaving of the horses after their will.
And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill. And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow forming itself. In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of iris where the bow should be. Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven. And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-Title
- Series
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- A note on the Hebrew Bible
- Introduction
- 1 The environment and the betrayal of the covenant
- 2 Nature and the biblical calendar: festivals and psalms
- 3 ‘Promised lands’ and national poetry
- 4 Sacred landscapes in exile
- 5 Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh!
- 6 The Bible, charity, and agricultural law
- 7 The piper at the gates of dawn: loss and Nature
- 8 ‘Man is the tree of the field’
- 9 Free will, divine law, and science
- 10 Energy and its abuse
- 11 Environmental disaster in the Bible
- 12 The apocalyptic beast let loose
- 13 Swords to ploughshares: the vision of universal peace
- 14 Humility: God’s reply to Job from the whirlwind—where were you?
- 15 Industry and the Romantics: Blake, Wordsworth, and Goethe
- 16 The environment and ‘Condition of England’ novelists
- 17 Marx: the industrial environment as crime
- 18 Ibsen, Chekhov, and the moral environment
- 19 The rediscovery of Nature in Mendele, Bialik, and Tchernichowsky
- 20 The Waste Land: sin and suffering
- 21 Environmental abuse in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
- 22 Post-1945 literature: the quest for a lost Eden
- Bibliography
- Index