Globalizing the Peasant: Access to Land and the Possibility of Self-Realization

by Virginia L. Lewis

Globalizing the Peasant examines literary narratives from across the globe as an "affective archive" of crucial information regarding the human experience of globalization over the last 150 years. Her revealing lens is focused on agrarian populations whose deep emotional and spiritual attachment to the land has been irrevocably disrupted by the globalization processes of enclosure, commodification, and industrialization. In a wide-ranging corpus of texts from what Lewis terms "Global Land Literature, " she uncovers a well-spring of evidence concerning the harmful impact of globalization on human efforts to secure a happy existence and derive meaning and value from life. At the same time, she reveals that these very narratives are a crucial resource for ways to counteract the often destructive tendencies of global commercialization. Globalizing the Peasant thus underscores the abiding relevance of literature as an indispensable guide for ethical conduct in the new millennium.

316 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 2007