Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet » (1)

Elizabeth Ammons is Harriet H. Fay Professor of Literature at Tufts University. She is the author of Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century and Edith Wharton’s Argument with America and the editor of many volumes, including the Norton Critical Editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The House of Mirth.

Brave New Words challenges present and future literary scholars and teachers to look beyond mere literary critique toward the concrete issue of social change and how to achieve it. Calling for a profound realignment of thought and spirit in the service of positive social change, Ammons argues for the continued importance of multiculturalism in the twenty-first century despite attacks on the concept from both right and left. Concentrating on activist U.S. writers—from ecocritics to feminists to those dedicated to exposing race and class biases, from Jim Wallis and Cornel West to Winona LaDuke and Paula Moya and many others—she calls for all humanists to link their work to the progressive literature of the last half century, to insist on activism in the service of positive change as part of their mission, and to teach the power of hope and action to their students.

Table of contents: 

Preface ix

1 Postmodern Fundamentalism 1

2 What David Walker and Harriet Beecher

Stowe Still Have to Teach Us 37

3 The Multicultural Imperative 77

4 Rising Waters 103

5 Jesus, Marx, and the Future of the Planet 139

Acknowledgment 175

A Note on Method 177

Works Cited 179

Index 191