Books in the Ecocritical Theory and Practice series

This book offers a timely exploration of the rapidly growing field of ecocriticism and gives prominence to the writers, creators, theorists, traditions, concerns, and landscapes of Southeast Asia. The contributors emphasize the transnational flows between Southeast Asian countries and Australia, England, Taiwan (Formosa), and the United States.

The romantic perception of the American Southwest as a wild and dangerous frontier where heroic settlers prove their endurance has often responded to a common human desire to escape from the pressures of civilization and experience an ';authentic' relationship with nature. This idealized notion about life in the Southwest, however, has contributed the subjugation of the indigenous populations and the natural world while helping rationalize the conquest of both. In Myth and Environment in Recent Southwestern Literature, Theda Wrede brings contemporary Southwestern American literature under the microscope to examine the ways in which the mythic narrative has influenced attitudes toward the land in the region. Focusing on popular novels by Corrmac McCarthy, Barbara Kingsolver, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Denise Chvez, Wrede explores the psychology behind the myth and discusses the ways in which the four authors deploy the mythic narrative, interrogate its validity, and offer visions for alternative modes of inhabiting the Southwest. In combining ideas from a culturally sensitive ecofeminist theory, psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies, and literary studies, the study offers an innovative conceptual framework for discussions about environmental responsibility in the twenty-first century. Finally, it also encourages its readers to partake in the process of mythogenesis by imagining ';sustainable' narratives to help rescue the promise of the Southwest for the new millennium.

Narratives of Environmental Challenges in Brazil and India: Losing Nature is comprised of research on the representation and interrogation of environmental issues in both subcontinents, Brazil and India.

By pursuing an ecocritical reading, The Forest in Medieval German Literature examines passages in medieval German texts where protagonists operated in the forest and found themselves either in conflictual situations or in refuge. By probing the way the individual authors dealt with the forest, illustrating how their characters fared in this sylvan space, the role of the forest proved to be of supreme importance in understanding the fundamental relationship between humans and nature. The medieval forest almost always introduced an epistemological challenge: how to cope in life, or how to find one's way in this natural maze. By approaching these narratives through modern ecocritical issues that are paired with premodern perspectives, we gain a solid and far-reaching understanding of how medieval concepts can aid in a better understanding of human society and nature in its historical context. This book revisits some of the best and lesser known examples of medieval German literature, and the critical approach used here will allow us to recognize the importance of medieval literature for a profound reassessment of our modern existence with respect to our own forests.

Italian writer and filmmaker Gianni Celati's 1989 philosophical travelogue Towards the River's Mouth explores perception, memory, place and space as it recounts a series of journeys across the Po River Valley in northern Italy. This edition, translated into English for the first time, features a selection of ten essays by various scholars.

This book affirms its feminist and activist roots, resists gender essentialisms, and companions the activist orientations of critical animal studies and environmental justice. It draws on feminist science and anticolonial studies, utilizing a posthumanist, queer feminist methodology to enhance discussions of today's ecopolitical challenges.

In Transversal Ecocritical Praxis: Theoretical Arguments, Literary Analysis, and Cultural Critique, Patrick D. Murphy, Ph.D, utilizes ecocriticism and ecofeminism to develop his concept of transversal practice: an interdisciplinary combination of theory and applied criticism. He begins by explaining the necessity for cutting across disciplinary boundaries of all kinds in order to address the ecological dimensions of culture and literature. The dialogical foundation of this orientation is elaborated through a consideration of the theories of Mikhail Bkahtin, particularly in terms of the ethical responsibilities of the reader and critic. Murphy then takes up issues of identity and subject formation in relation to genetics, embodiment, and selfhood. These same issues play out in the history of the aesthetic category of the sublime, which the author critiques from an ecofeminist perspective. Following that, he turns attention to cultural issues of consumption, both at home and internationally, looking particularly at postcolonial literature and forms of resistance to globalizations and agricultural land grabs. Resistance and postcolonial literature is further analyzed through consideration of two book-length Latin American poetic sequences, one by Pablo Neruda and the other by Ernesto Cardenal. Switching from works focused on the present, Murphy turns his attention then to how these themes play out in the future oriented worlds of science fiction. He concludes with two chapters that combine ecocriticial cultural critique and economic analysis in studies of the destructive role of megadams, particularly in Asia, and the impact of the combined threats of peak oil and climate change on one islands tourist economy. The conclusion contains a discussion of further drivers of future ecocritical analysis. Traversing a wide range of examples, literary, cultural and economic, this work fleshes out the benefits of an ethically grounded interdisciplinary ecocriticism.

Using the rubric of the "Global South," this volume allows scholars from underrepresented regions to offer commentary on the ecological conditions and environmental cultures in the developing world.

This book includes a collection of essays that explore the relationship between Disability Studies and literary ecocriticism, particularly as this relationship plays out in American literature and culture. The contributors to this collection operate from the premise that there is much to be gained for both fields by putting them in conversation, and they do so in a variety of ways. In this manner, the collection contributes to what Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic have referred to as a "third wave of ecocriticism." Adamson and Slovic attribute the rise of this "third wave" to the richly diverse contributions to ecocriticism over the past decade by scholars intent on including postmodernism, ecofeminism, transnationalism, globalization, and postcolonialism into ecocritical discussions. The essays in Toward an Ecosomatic Paradigm extend this approach of this "third wave" by analyzing disability from an "environmental point of view" while simultaneously examining the environmental imagination from a disability studies perspective. More specifically, the goal of the collection is to investigate the role that literary narratives play in fostering the "ecosomatic paradigm." As a theoretical framework, the ecosomatic paradigm underscores the dynamic and inter-relational process wherein human mind-bodies interact with the places, both built and wild, they inhabit. That is, the ecosomatic paradigm proceeds from the assumption that nature and culture are meshed in an ongoing and deep relationship that has implications for both the human subject and the natural world. An ecosomatic approach highlights the profound overlap between embodiment and emplacement, and is therefore enriched by both disability studies and ecocritical insight. By drawing on points of confluence between disability studies and ecological criticism, the various ecosomatic readings in this collection challenge normative (even ableist) constructions of the body-environment dyad by complicating and expanding our understanding of this relationship as it is represented in American literature and culture. Collectively, the essays in this book augment the American environmental imagination by highlighting the relationship between disability and the environment as reflected in American literary texts across multiple periods and genres.

The book offers a close examination of the rhetoric and discourses around the Bhopal disaster through a reading of numerous cultural texts-from fiction to protest effigies and posters - and maps the production of an ecological Gothic around the disaster.

Ecopoetics and the Global Landscape: Critical Essays is a collection of trans-national essays on the intersection of ecopoetics and foundational theoretical issues within ecocriticism, such as environmental justice, indigenous studies, animal studies, new materialism, as well as the local and global.

By focusing on ancient culture and its reception, this book integrates antiquity into our current ecocritical theory and practice to fill in a gap in our environmental debates. It aims at a re-evaluation of antiquity in the present-day environmental concerns and re-frames our modern outlook on the more-than-human world from different cultures.

The book provides innovative pedagogical approaches and instructional tools for educators to inspire, motivate, and lead students to take active steps toward environmental respect, sustainability, and preservation.

Rhetorical Animals explores what the study of communication and persuasion would look like if it included the voices of all persuasive species, from the microscopic gut bacteria to the charismatic megafauna we know so well.

Through the lens of ecocriticism, history, memory, and gender studies, this book studies the many ways in which the image of the river has been integrated into Latin/o American literature from the period of exploration and colonization to modern times, examining the imagery and symbolism tied to rivers in the writings of the region.

Seeing Animals after Derrida marks a shift in studies of visuality in animal philosophy. Presenting an emergent set of questions for animal studies scholars, this volume intervenes in recent debates of the nonhuman turn that have been incited in the wake of a post-deconstructionist era.

This book opens a conversation about the mediated relationship between culture and ecology. The terms ecology and culture are past separation. We are far removed from their prior historical binaric connection, and they coincide through a supplementary role to each other. Ecology and culture are unified.

The book examines the interpretations, functions and interactions of the Fall - physical, moral, artistic and otherwise - as represented through animals, or through human-animal interactions, in various religious contexts, art, and literature.

This book examines the influence of the science of the age upon a host of English and American authors. The collection develops transhistorical and transnational perspectives to examine the invaluable place of Romantic literary studies as inspiration behind the rise of early environmentalism in the nineteenth century and its subsequent legacies.

Avenging Nature explores how nature strikes back against human domination. International experts examine, from a multipdisciplinary perspective, the insubordinate representations of nature in modern and contemporary art and literature, and advocate for the insurgence of nature within and outside the realm of culture.

This interdisciplinary collection explores Victorian literature and its connection to various fields such as environmental history, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Further, the edition features seminal nineteenth-century figures advancing the cause of early environmental justice linked to place.

This book explores the balancing function that horses play when they become central characters in literature and film. Through close readings of texts from the Middle Ages until the present, covering works from Eastern and Western cultures, the book examines the deep symbolic meaning, cultural significance, and projective power of these animals.

This book rethinks cities' relationships to sustainable development from a cultural studies perspective with social justice as its goal. Chapter authors are optimistic that cities can achieve sustainability, but insist that cities will if participation in the effort is inclusive of all groups.

The book provides ecocultural perspectives on ethics from a variety of cultural contexts. It argues that any ecological perspectives/issues/conditions cannot be separated from their cultural contexts and thus, we need to employ a culture-specific scrutiny to understand the ethics of ecoculture.

This book is an international collection of ecocritical essays that examine sustainability in relation to Romantic-era Britain. It examines Romantic works while interrogating issues of race, gender, religion, and identity, beginning with inspiration and creativity and ending with considerations about extinction and apocalypse.

This book uncovers the rich variety of environmental writing across the genres in nineteenth-century American literature. The essays in this collection offer a representative sampling of the nineteenth century's evolving exploration of the interplay between humans and the natural environment.

The term ';urban ecology' has become a buzzword in various disciplines, including the social and natural sciences as well as urban planning and architecture. The environmental humanities have been slow to adapt to current theoretical debates, often excluding human-built environments from their respective frameworks. This book closes this gap both in theory and in practice, bringing together ';urban ecology' with ecocritical and cultural ecological approaches by conceptualizing the city as an integral part of the environment and as a space in which ecological problems manifest concretely. Arguing that culture has to be seen as an active component and integral factor within urban ecologies, it makes use of a metaphorical use of the term, perceiving cities as spatial phenomena that do not only have manifold and complex material interrelations with their respective (natural) environments, but that are intrinsically connected to the ideas, imaginations, and interpretations that make up the cultural symbolic and discursive side of our urban lives and that are stored and constantly renegotiated in their cultural and artistic representations. The city is, within this framework, both seen as an ecosystemically organized space as well as a cultural artifact. Thus, the urban ecology outlined in this study takes its main impetus from an analysis of examples taken from contemporary culture that deal with urban life and the complex interrelations between urban communities and their (natural and built) environments.

Although current environmental debates lay the focus on the Industrial Revolution as a sociopolitical development that has led to the current environmental crisis, many ecocritical projects have avoided historicizing their concepts or have been characterized by approaches that were either pre-historic or post-historic: while the environmental movement has harbored the dream of restoring nature to a state untouched by human hands, there is also the pessimistic vision of a post-apocalyptic world, exhausted by humanityΓÇÖs consumption of natural resources. Against this background, the decline of nature has become a narrative template quite common among the public environmental discourse and environmental scientists alike. The volume revisits Antiquity as an epoch which witnessed similar environmental problems and came up with its own interpretations and solutions in dealing with them. This decidedly historical perspective is not only supposed to fill in a blank in ecocritical discourse, but also to question, problematize, and inform our contemporary debates with a completely different take on ΓÇ£natureΓÇ¥ and humanityΓÇÖs place in the world. Thereby, a productive dialogue between contemporary ecocritical theories and the classical tradition is established that highlights similarities as well as differences. This volume is the first book to bring ecocriticism and the classical tradition into a comprehensive dialogue. It assembles recognized experts in the field and advanced scholars as well as young and aspiring ecocritics. In order to ensure a dialogic exchange between the contributions, the volume includes four response essays by established ecocritics which embed the sections within a larger theoretical and practical ecocritical framework and discuss the potential of including the pre-modern world into our environmental debates.

New International Voices in Ecocriticism presents a compendium of ecocritical approaches, including ecocritical theory, ecopoetics, ecocritical analyses of literary, cultural, and musical texts, and new critical vistas on human-nonhuman relations, postcolonial subjects, material selves, gender, and queer ecologies.