Reclaiming John Steinbeck

Writing for the Future of Humanity

Gavin Jones

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781108844123
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108945943
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

John Steinbeck is a towering figure in twentieth-century American literature; yet he remains one of our least understood writers. This major reevaluation of Steinbeck by Gavin Jones uncovers a timely thinker who confronted the fate of humanity as a species facing climate change, environmental crisis, and a growing divide between the powerful and the marginalized. Driven by insatiable curiosity, Steinbeck's work crossed a variety of borders – between the United States and the Global South, between human and nonhuman lifeforms, between science and the arts, and between literature and film – to explore the transformations in consciousness necessary for our survival on a precarious planet. Always seeking new forms to express his ecological and social vision of human interconnectedness and vulnerability, Steinbeck is a writer of urgent concern for the twenty-first century, even as he was haunted by the legacies of racism and injustice in the American West.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Loving and Hating Steinbeck
• Chapter 1 Short Stories in School and Lab: “Tularecito” and “The Snake”
• Chapter 2 Drought, Climate, and Race in the West: To a God Unknown
• Chapter 3 Race and Revision: “The Vigilante” and “Johnny Bear”
• Chapter 4 Becoming Animal: Theories of Mind in The Red Pony
• Chapter 5 What Is It Like to Be a Plant? “The Chrysanthemums” and “The White Quail”
• Chapter 6 On Not Being a Modernist: Disability and Performance in Of Mice and Men
• Chapter 7 Emergence and Failure: The Middleness of The Grapes of Wrath
• Chapter 8 Borderlands: Extinction and the New World Outlook in Sea of Cortez
• Chapter 9 Mexican Revolutions: The Forgotten Village, The Pearl, and the Global South
• Epilogue The Aftertaste of Cannery Row
• Notes
• Index