Books in the Ecocritical Theory and Practice series

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.