Abstract:This article explores the history of southern soil erosion as documented in the New Deal–era art works of John McCrady, James Routh, Buell Whitehead, Nell Choate Jones, and Hale Woodruff. While scholars in the interdisciplinary field of ecocriticism have found environmental significance in the literary texts of the Southern Renaissance, they have largely overlooked the period's visual arts. This essay seeks to address this omission with an examination of paintings and prints that bear witness to the depleted landscapes of the early twentieth-century South. The result of overzealous deforestation and imprudent farming practices, acute soil erosion predated the Great Plains' barren fields by decades and nearly paralyzed a region still recovering from the devastation of the Civil War. The surveyed works stand as a cautionary tale of environmental disregard and, anticipating the eco-commentaries of the South's new millennial artists, raise important questions about the region's longstanding fealty to extraction economies.

中文翻译：

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描绘道路的尽头：新政和新千禧一代南方的艺术与环境

摘要：本文探讨了约翰·麦克拉迪、詹姆斯·罗斯、比尔·怀特黑德、内尔·乔特·琼斯和黑尔·伍德拉夫在新政时代的艺术作品中记录的南部土壤侵蚀的历史。虽然生态批评跨学科领域的学者在南方文艺复兴时期的文学文本中发现了环境意义，但他们在很大程度上忽视了这一时期的视觉艺术。本文试图通过对见证 20 世纪早期南方枯竭景观的绘画和版画的考察来解决这一遗漏。由于过度的森林砍伐和轻率的耕作方式，严重的土壤侵蚀比大平原的贫瘠土地早了几十年，并且几乎使一个仍在从内战的破坏中恢复的地区陷入瘫痪。