Introduction: beyond the sacrifice zone.

To frame this collection of essays, this introduction reviews existing research on sacrifice zones and related concepts, extractivist thinking and regenerative mindsets, and the presence of damaged settings in contemporary literature and literary history. To be more precise, it considers the affordances and limitations of notions such as the extractive zone, the contact zone, and the critical zone alongside attempts to articulate hopeful strategies of counter-extractivist reading and writing before identifying precursors of the sacrifice zone in the literary archive and briefly sketching recent shifts in mining and extraction technologies. To illustrate these points, the paper then turns to Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport and explains how this angry novel represents violated sites as well as settings of hope and resists the easy solutions of compromise aesthetics by summoning an indignant and anti-extractivist public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]