Chapter 12 - Naturalism, Regionalism, and Climate (In)determinism

Summary

Scientific advances of the nineteenth and early twentieth century meant climate began to be understood as something to be measured and described technically; yet the supposed objectivity of this scientific discourse became inseparable from the subjectivity of social comment and prejudice. With its interest in putting different discourses in tension, Modernist writing is well suited to challenge these conceptions, and the growing literary recognition of under- or unrepresented communities saw a diversity of cultures being written. While Modernist writers such as Stein and Stevens complicated easy assertions about the social effects of climate, Southern and African-American writers including Faulkner, Hurston and Hughes contested generalized or racially inflected climatic theories. It is the economy rather than environment that places the figures of American Modernist literature in their privileged or precarious positions, which only then determines whether they can exploit or are subject to the climate. Such writing reveals the limitations and failures of technical and economic understandings of the environment, troubling them with personal and bodily experience of weather.