"Clear-Cutting Eden" examines how Southern literary depictions of the natural world were influenced by the historical, social, and ecological changes of the 1930s and 1940s.Rieger studies the ways that nature is conceived of and portrayed by four prominent Southern writers of the era: Erskine Caldwell, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner. Specifically, he argues that these writers created new versions of an old literary mode the pastoral in response to the destabilizing effects of the Great Depression, the rise of Southern modernism, and the mechanization of...