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Memoir and the End of the Natural World single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Memoir and the End of the Natural World
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'This essay draws on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses” to test the capacity of memoir to bear witness to the Anthropocene. The essay focuses on three texts that feature memoirs of childhood on the wheat frontiers in Canada and Australia—Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow (1962), Barbara York Main’s Twice Trodden Ground (1971), and Dorothy Hewett’s Wild Card (1990). As an instrument of colonization and Indigenous dispossession, the impact of wheat was catastrophic, and these memoirs engage with the particular sites and circumstances that shape acts of remembering “wheaten childhoods.”' (Publication abstract)

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    y separately published work icon A/b : Auto/Biography Studies vol. 35 no. 1 2020 26447354 2020 periodical issue 'Two images locate this special issue. The first is the portrait on the cover of “Life Writing in the Anthropocene,” from Anna Laurent’s immersive installation Flora: Exploration to Extinction. This site-specific installation was commissioned for the corridors of the Exhibitionist Hotel in South Kensington, London, in 2018. Arranged on the saturated color of the emerald walls, the gilt frames emphasize the portrait presentation of black silhouettes of species of extinct or endangered flora, each accompanied by an information panel including the plant name, native ecology, and ecological pressures. Laurent chose black silhouettes to signify the absence of these plants in the landscape, as well as a historical reference to conventions of Victorian portraiture and nineteenth-century plant exploration, a period during which “species traveled the globe and luxurious images of flora were fetishized,” particularly in an era of perceived ecological abundance.1 Here, the gilt frames are surrounded by dried seed heads and leaves, preserved relics of plant life that are spray-painted gold. The specific silhouette we have selected for the cover is the miniature cactus Biznaguita (Mammillaria sanchez-mejoradae), which is endemic to one location in Neuvo León, Mexico. Its population has reduced by seventy-five percent in fifteen years and it is at risk of extinction due to illegal collection and climate change.' (Jessica White and Gillian Whitlock Introduction) 2020 pg. 183-205
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Last amended 28 Jun 2023 11:57:07
183-205 Memoir and the End of the Natural Worldsmall AustLit logo A/b : Auto/Biography Studies
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