Bøker i Ecocritical Theory and Practice-serien

This book examines how Hawthorne's notebooks provide a key for understanding the environmental elements of his fiction writing. Hawthorne's four major romances are the main focus of study, but his short fiction and nonfiction also show a man convinced that human and nonhuman nature are inextricably intertwined.

This edited collection examines the ecological and cultural dynamics of humanarboreal kinship in environmental literature and art.

Migrant Ecologies investigates how Zheng Xiaoqiong's poetry exposes the entanglements of migrant ecologies with local and global networks of capital and labor and the challenges faced by women migrant workers.

Bringing together work from twelve leading scholars in the field of ecocriticism, Modernism and the Anthropocene explores the diverse ways that early twentieth-century literature initiated far-reaching conversations about the material and non-human world.

Taking up the collective insistence on the centrality of story to extinction studies, this volume engages with what is traditionally understood as Anthropocene fiction and highlights the questions these fictions ask of extinction, while simultaneously bringing texts typically not thought of as Anthropocene fiction into fruitful discourse.

In Shamanism in the Contemporary Novel, Özlem Ö¿üt Yaz¿c¿ölu examines shamanism as a significant trope in a selection of contemporary novels. Yaz¿c¿ölu finds that these works ultimately challenge anthropocentric and androcentric discourses and offer alternative perspectives for social and environmental justice on an endangered planet.

Avian Aesthetics in Literature and Culture challenges species centrism through essays that bridge various environment-focused perspectives and methodologies.

Dike Okoro analyzes the various manifestations of ecocriticism and political activism in the poetry of Lupenga Mphande, who is arguably Africa's first poet to explore the existence of territorial cults and natural shrines. This book is recommended for students and scholars seeking new interpretations of the African experience in contemporary world literature.

The vast majority of existing ecocritical studies, even those which espouse the ';postcolonial ecocritical' perspective, operate within a first-world sensibility, speaking on behalf of subalternized human communities and degraded landscapes without actually eliciting the voices of the impacted communities. Ecocriticism of the Global South seeks to allow scholars from (or intimately familiar with) underrepresented regions to ';write back' to the world's centers of political and military and economic power, expressing views of the intersections of nature and culture from the perspective of developing countries. This approach highlights what activist and writer Vandana Shiva has described as the relationship between ';ecology and the politics of survival,' showing both commonalities and local idiosyncrasies by juxtaposing such countries as China and Northern Ireland, New Zealand and Cameroon. Much like Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development, this new book is devoted to representing diverse and innovative ecocritical voices from throughout the world, particularly from developing nations. The two volumes complement each other by pointing out the need for further cultivation of the environmental humanities in regions of the world that are, essentially, the front line of the human struggle to invent sustainable and just civilizations on an imperiled planet.

The term ';Anthropocene', the era of mankind, is increasingly being used as a scientific designation for the current geological epoch. This is because the human species now dominates ecosystems worldwide, and affects nature in a way that rivals natural forces in magnitude and scale. Thinking about Animals in the Age of the Anthropocene presents a dozen chapters that address the role and place of animals in this epoch characterized by anthropogenic (human-made) environmental change. While some chapters describe our impact on the living conditions of animals, others question conventional ideas about human exceptionalism, and stress the complex cognitive and other abilities of animals. The Anthropocene idea forces us to rethink our relation to nature and to animals, and to critically reflect on our own role and place in the world, as a species. Nature is not what it was. Nor are the lives of animals as they used to be before mankinds rise to global ecological prominence. Can we eventually learn to live with animals, rather than causing extinction and ecological mayhem?

Throughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential differencerather than a porous transitionbetween the human and animal. Attempts to assign essential properties to humans (e.g., language, reason, or morality) often reflected ulterior aims to defend a privileged position for humans..This book shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the questions ';What is human?' and ';What is animal?' What makes this collection unique is that it fills a lacuna in critical animal studies and the growing field of ecocriticism. It is the first collection that establishes a productive encounter between philosophical perspectives on the humananimal boundary and those that draw on fictional literature. The objective is to establish a dialogue between those disciplines with the goal of expanding the imaginative scope of human-animal relationships. The contributions thus do not only trace and deconstruct the boundaries dividing humans and nonhuman animals, they also present the reader with alternative perspectives on the porous continuum and surprising reversal of what appears as human and what as nonhuman.

This book establishes how ecopoetics can provide insight into the poetic echoes of the living earth that are diffracted in environmental fiction, encouraging a reenchantment that adheres to postmodern science, while braiding various onto-epistemological threads. It reentangles...

Nicole C. Dittmer offers a reimagining of the popular Gothic female ';monster' figure in early-to-mid-Victorian literature. Regardless of the extensive scholarship concerning monstrosities, these pre-fin-de-siecle figurations have often been neglected by critical studies or interpreted as fragments of mind and body which create a division between culture and nature. In Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism, Dittmer deploys monism to delineate from and contest such dualism, unifies the material-immaterial aspects of fictional women, and blurs the distinction between nature-culture. Blending intertextual disciplines of medical sciences, ecofeminism, and fiction, she exposes female monstrosities as material and semiotic figurations. This book, then, identifies how women in the Victorian Gothic are informed by the entanglement of both immaterial discourses and material conditions. When repressed by social customs, the monistic mind-body of the material-semiotic figure reacts to and disrupts processes of ontology, transforming women into ';wild' and ';monstrous' (re)presentations.

Following Franoise d'Eaubonne's creation of the term ';ecofeminism' in 1974, scholars around the world have explored ways that the degradation of the environment and the subjugation of women are linked. In the nearly three decades since the publication of the classical work Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva in 1993, several collections have appeared that apply ecofeminism to literary criticism, also known as feminist ecocriticism. The most recent of these include anthologies that emphasize international perspectives, furthering the comparative task launched by Mies and Shiva. To date, however, there have been no books devoted to gaining a broad-based understanding of feminist ecocriticism in India, understood in its own terms. Our new volume Indian Feminist Ecocriticism offers a survey of literature as seen through an ecofeminist lens by Indian scholars, which places contemporary literary analysis through a sampling of its diverse languages and in the context of millennia-old mythic traditions of India.

Throughout his works, Thomas Pynchon uses various animal characters to narrate fables that are vital to postmodernism and ecocriticism. Thomas Pynchon's Animal Tales: Fables for Ecocriticism examines case studies of animal representation in Pynchon's texts, such as alligators in the sewer in V.; the alligator purse in Bleeding Edge; dolphins in the Miami Seaquarium in The Crying of Lot 49; dodoes, pigs, and octopuses in Gravity's Rainbow; Bigfoot and Godzilla in Vineland and Inherent Vice; and preternatural dogs and mythical worms in Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. Through this exploration, Keita Hatooka illuminates how radically and imaginatively the legendary novelist depicts his empathy for nonhuman beings. Furthermore, by conducting a comparative study of Pynchon's narratives and his contemporary documentarians and thinkers, Thomas Pynchon's Animal Tales leads readers to draw great lessons from the fables, which stimulate our ecocritical thought for tomorrow.

The book covers the medieval Turkic societies' assiduous commitment to build spiritually significant and uninterrupted relationships with nonhuman animals, showing animals' active participation in the evolution of humans' communal identities, codes of behavior, and spiritual and emotional lives.