Landscapes of labor: Nature, work, and environmental justice in Depression-era fiction

Environmental literary criticism has mostly overlooked the important historical relationship between literary representations of exploited workers and labor reform movements and parallel depictions of environmental degradation, while working-class literary criticism has not fully considered the role of nature's labor in literary representations of working-class lives. As a result, most ecocritical and working-class scholarship has treated the natural environment and human labor issues as separate concerns. This dissertation advocates an interdisciplinary, nature/labor-oriented perspective for reading novels that is grounded in the convergence of environmental justice ecocriticism, working-class studies, and environmental history. This approach assumes that nature's labor and human labor are mutually constitutive and correspondingly affected by environmental and social injustices. Focusing upon the insights of Depression-era, Appalachian novels, this dissertation presents labor oppression and environmental degradation as interrelated consequences of industrial hegemony. The significance of these novels lies not only in their desire to draw attention to social, political, and cultural injustices, but also in their depictions of simultaneous and equally unparalleled changes in the natural world as coincident and interrelated to human labor. An introductory chapter provides the project's theoretical grounding in environmental justice ecocriticism, working-class studies, and environmental history and considers how Depression-era, Appalachian novels perform the cultural work of confronting and challenging the social and environmental contexts from which they emerged. Chapter two focuses on representations of environmental racism and occupational toxicity in Hubert Skidmore's Hawk's Nest (1941). Chapter three examines images of women's labor, agrarian loss, and the actual and ideological separation between nature's labor and human labor in the built environment in Grace Lumpkin's To Make My Bread (1932). Chapter four investigates themes of deracination, including physical displacement and cultural dislocation, in James Still's River of Earth (1940). Chapter five concludes the project with a discussion of women's labor and environmental contamination in Ann Pancake's Strange as this Weather Has Been (2007). In their own fashion, each of these writers protests the destruction of the people and the land in southern Appalachia. The work of environmental justice ecocritics must be to illuminate these expressions of the inseparability of social and environmental injustices.