One of the poetic features of Isaiah is its intertextuality. The authors of the later portions of the book worked with attention to the existing Isaianic texts, so that the book as a whole is woven together by common themes and vocabulary. Furthermore, the book is full of allusions to other biblical books, and was itself eventually a touchstone for later biblical authors. (Sometimes it is even uncertain which text came first!) Hyun Chul Paul Kim, in “Isaiah in Intertextual Perspective,” analyzes the book at each of these levels, and then looks forward to “points of intersectionality” between Isaiah and the modern world.

How could Robert Lowell, a blue-blooded New England Brahmin, make the counterintuitive claim “I’m Southern” (as he did in a letter)? The chapter focuses on Lowell’s early apprenticeship to the Southern Agrarians and particularly Allen Tate, the author of a tense, neo-Metaphysical poetry that powerfully influenced Lowell. The traditionalist-modernist precepts of the Agrarians both gave Lowell a way of understanding his Puritan inheritance as an abstract Platonism and allowed him to counter it through the Catholic worldview of Tate. The chapter explains how the Civil War was central to Lowell’s verse, but how his interpretation of the conflict was partly skewed toward Southern readings of it. This especially emerges in “For the Union Dead,” Lowell’s answer to Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Later, the literary South became less important to Lowell when he moved toward the more disconnected, personalistic style found in Life Studies.

This chapter examines the role of land in the history of political thought, specifically with regard to the concepts of value, productivity, natural harmony, and independence, and how, via the notion of the body as a universal materialist foundation, these have been conceptualised in the history of land reform agitation, both in Ireland and beyond. It examines the ideas and influence of key figures such as Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill, setting them in a much broader context of the long-standing tensions between liberal political economy and liberal individualism. The distinctiveness of land, based on the presumption of an individual natural right to life to which land was integral, formed the basis of this paradox in political thought. The chapter also analyses the place of land in Irish political economy, and the challenges faced by Irish economists in discarding references to moral purposiveness in economic thought.

This introductory chapter lays out the central importance of the interlocking influence of Henry George and the Irish Land War in animating a resurgent agrarianism in the 1880s, as well as the influence these political tendencies had on the trajectory of liberal political thought. It briefly explores the historiographical background of the late nineteenth century land question, particularly interpretations of the Irish Land War, and the uneasy place of Henry George in these narratives. The role of land in shaping Ireland’s distinctive political economy and its liminal place in the wider Anglophone world is also discussed. This introduction also assesses how the question of land can cut across the concerns of intellectual and social history in a way that enables connections to be made between popular attitudes and political thought, and explains how this methodological approach will be used. Finally, the chapter sets out the structure of the subsequent book.

As reflected throughout his writing and oratory, the environment figured prominently in Frederick Douglass’s life. Notably, his engagement with the environment extended well beyond its personal impact to its broader place in the lives of all black people in the United States, enslaved and free alike. Drawing on life experience as well as leading eco-political discourse of his day, Douglass’s representation of the environment reveals an underexplored dimension of his calls for black liberation, which preceded and followed the abolition of slavery. Examining the extent to which the biophysical world and black life are entwined in Douglass’s work invites fresh insight into his thinking on a range of subjects, including the more consequential such as slavery and freedom.

While I’ll Take My Stand is a terrible book by any standard of argumentation, it belongs in a history of the literature of the U.S. South because virtually the entire history of mainstream southern studies, literary and otherwise, is based on a distorted and selective reading of that Agrarian manifesto. The past ninety years’ profoundly opposed receptions of I’ll Take My Stand inside and outside of southern studies are thus ultimately much more significant than the book that prompted the receptions. Virtually all the critiques of old southern studies offered by the so-called new southern studies have been regularly made by scholars and critics outside the field since the manifesto appeared; conversely, even today, much allegedly “progressive” southernist scholarship continues to promulgate Agrarian ideals that romanticize the land, tradition, and the rural.

As rising seas, spreading wildfires, and unbearable heat shrink the expanse of the habitable earth, the prospect of a contracting world resonates in particular and forceful ways within the American imaginary. Recent American climate fiction responds to the specter of a shrinking world by reprising narratives of the American frontier, simultaneously unsettling and reanimating elements of these stories. This chapter pays attention to stories of neo-agrarian settlements, depictions of internal displacements and migrations, and portrayals of corporate collapse in the wake of dwindling carbon economies. It argues that American climate fiction can run retrograde, reiterating the very seizures of land and political suppressions that underwrote the American frontier. However, the radical environmental changes envisioned in this genre also intensify ongoing struggles for racial and economic justice in the United States, opening the possibility of more equitable forms of relation. Although the climatic future is often depicted as a brave new world, an unknown terrain, climate narratives must acknowledge rather than subsume history: A changed world must not be mistaken for a wholly new one.