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In 1903 John Burroughs published an ""Atlantic Monthly"" article attacking popular nature writers as ""sham naturalists"". This debate resulted in a new standard of accuracy for the nature writer and reflected a new way of thinking about moral responsibilities to wildlife.

What makes trash trash? How do we decide what to throw away? Driven by these questions and others, Samuel Amago takes us through the streets and alleys of Spain, sorting through recycling bins, libraries, social media, bookstores, and message boards in search of things that have been forgotten, jettisoned, forsaken.

Drawing inspiration from Timothy Morton's concept of the "mesh" as a metaphor for the human-nonhuman relationship in the face of climate change, Marco Caracciolo investigates how narratives in genres such as the novel and the short story employ formal devices to channel the entanglement of human communities and nonhuman phenomena.

"In a narrative that touches on topics ranging from seed banks to science fiction to birdwatching, Callaway argues--through a variety of media and genres--that there is no set, generally accepted way to measure biodiversity"--

Ecocriticism is a field that is expanding dramatically. This volume is a collection of essays by ecocritics and scholars from the literary and environmental arenas. Together, their work seeks to signal a new direction in the field and offer insights into a broad spectrum of texts.

Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earth's atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction. This period of observable human impact on the Earth's ecosystems has been called the Anthropocene Age. The anthropogenic climate change that has impacted the Earth has also affected our literature, but criticism of the contemporary novel has not adequately recognized the literary response to this level of environmental crisis. Ecocriticism's theories of place and planet, meanwhile, are troubled by a climate that is neither natural nor under human control. Anthropocene Fictions is the first systematic examination of the hundreds of novels that have been written about anthropogenic climate change.Drawing on climatology, the sociology and philosophy of science, geography, and environmental economics, Adam Trexler argues that the novel has become an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate change. The novel expands the reach of climate science beyond the laboratory or model, turning abstract predictions into subjectively tangible experiences of place, identity, and culture. Political and economic organizations are also being transformed by their struggle for sustainability. In turn, the novel has been forced to adapt to new boundaries between truth and fabrication, nature and economies, and individual choice and larger systems of natural phenomena. Anthropocene Fictions argues that new modes of inhabiting climate are of the utmost critical and political importance, when unprecedented scientific consensus has failed to lead to action. Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

'Eco-Man' brings together two rapidly growing fields: men's studies and ecocriticism. The volume's 20 essays question whether readers can construct a notion of manhood around ecological principles and practices - and if so, what this would look like, and how it would enrich men's studies.

This title explores how our environmental attitudes have been influenced and shaped by various scientific perspectives from the time of western expansion and geographic exploration in the mid-19th century to the start of the contemporary environmental movement in the 20th century.

'Eco-Man' brings together two rapidly growing fields: men's studies and ecocriticism. The volume's 20 essays question whether readers can construct a notion of manhood around ecological principles and practices - and if so, what this would look like, and how it would enrich men's studies.

Placing environmental literature in the life sciences, Love argues that literary studies has been diminshed by a lack of recognition for the role that the biological foundation of human life plays in cultural imagination. He presents a model incorporating Darwinian ideas into ecocritical thinking.

An ecocritical exploration of the varied preconceptions that have shaped and coloured the human relationship with the early Virginia landscape. Drawing on familiar history and lesser-known material, it focuses on the changes to the land over time and changes in the way people viewed Virginia.

Part guidebook and part exploration into literary history, this book explores how natural surroundings inspired works of literature set along the Appalachian Trail. The author examines how our modern estrangement from the natural world has affected our mental well-being.

In a sequence of publications in the 1760s, James Macpherson, a Scottish schoolteacher in the central Highlands, created fantastic epics of ancient heroes and presented them as genuine translations of the poetry of Ossian, a fictionalized Caledonian bard of the third century. In Ossianic Unconformities Eric Gidal introduces the idiosyncratic publications of a group of nineteenth-century Scottish eccentrics who used statistics, cartography, and geomorphology to map and thereby vindicate Macpherson's controversial eighteenth-century renderings of Gaelic oral traditions. Although these writers primarily sought to establish the authenticity of Macpherson's "e;translations,"e; they came to record, through promotion, evasion, and confrontation, the massive changes being wrought upon Scottish and Irish lands by British industrialization. Their obsessive and elaborate attempts to fix both the poetry and the land into a stable set of coordinates developed what we can now perceive as a nascent ecological perspective on literature in a changing world.Gidal examines the details of these imaginary geographies in conjunction with the social and spatial histories of Belfast and the River Lagan valley, Glasgow and the Firth of Clyde, and the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland, regions that form both the sixth-century kingdom of Dl Riata and the fabled terrain of the Ossianic poems. Combining environmental and industrial histories with the reception of the poems of Ossian, Ossianic Unconformities unites literary history and book studies with geography, cartography, and geology to present and consider imaginative responses to environmental catastrophe.

In Western culture, the separation of humans from nature has contributed to a schism between the conscious reason and the unconscious dreaming psyche, or internal human ""nature."" This book uses Jung's idea of the shadow to explore how this divorce results in alienation, projection, and often breakdown.

The calamitous impacts of climate change that are beginning to be felt around the world today expose the inextricability of human and natural histories. Arguing for a more complex account of such calamities, Kate Rigby examines a variety of past disasters, from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to the mega-hurricanes of the twenty-first century, revealing the dynamic interaction of diverse human and nonhuman factors in their causation, unfolding, and aftermath. Focusing on the link between the ways disasters are framed by the stories told about them and how people tend to respond to them in practice, Rigby also shows how works of narrative fiction invite ethical reflection on human relations with one another, with our often unruly earthly environs, and with other species in the face of eco-catastrophe. In its investigation of an array of authors from the Romantic period to the present-including Heinrich von Kleist, Mary Shelley, Theodor Storm, Colin Thiele, and Alexis Wright- Dancing with Disaster demonstrates the importance of the environmental humanities in the development of more creative, compassionate, ecologically oriented, and socially just responses to the perils and possibilities of the Anthropocene.Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

Engaging important discussions about social conflict, environmental change, and imperialism in Africa, Different Shades of Green points to legacies of African environmental writing, often neglected as a result of critical perspectives shaped by dominant Western conceptions of nature and environmentalism. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework employing postcolonial studies, political ecology, environmental history, and writing by African environmental activists, Byron Caminero-Santangelo emphasizes connections within African environmental literature, highlighting how African writers have challenged unjust, ecologically destructive forms of imperial development and resource extraction. Different Shades of Green also brings into dialogue a wide range of African creative writing-including works by Chinua Achebe, NgA gA wa Thiong'o, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, Nuruddin Farah, Wangari Maathai, and Ken Saro-Wiwa-in order to explore vexing questions for those involved in the struggle for environmental justice, in the study of political ecology, and in the environmental humanities, urging continued imaginative thinking in effecting a more equitable, sustainable future in Africa.

Recent decades have witnessed an explosion of interest in both autobiography and environmental literature. In Refiguring the Map of Sorrow, Mark Allister brings these two genres together by examining a distinct form of grief narrative, in which the writers deal with mourning by standing explicitly both outside and inside the text: outside in writing about the natural world; inside in making that exposition part of the grieving process.Building on Peter Fritzell's thesis in Nature Writing and America that the best American nature writing blends Aristotelian natural history and Augustinian confession, this work of literary interpretation draws on psychoanalytical narrative theory, studies of grieving, autobiography theory, and ecocriticism for its insights into how nature writing can become an autobiographical, healing act. Allister examines works by Terry Tempest Williams, Sue Hubbell, Peter Matthiessen, Bill Barich, William Least Heat-Moon, and Gretel Ehrlich in order to demonstrate the difficulty of hearing nature speak, and of translating terrain and self into language and form. As he focuses on the many ways in which humans connect-often deeply and urgently-to animals or the land, Allister vastly extends our understanding of "e;relational"e; autobiography.

A major problem facing American modernist poets was how to accommodate poetry and religion in a culture that considered science its most reliable source of truth. In this work, Robert Bernard Hass examines the ways in which conflict with science affected the development of Robert Frost's career.

Considering unpublished materials and the full range of Mary Austin's literary and theoretical writing, this text presents Austin as a significant early 20th-century author who reworked the traditions of nature writing and women's regionalism to envision a sustainable and democratic American culture.

Here, Scott Herring studies work on American National Parks from a wide spectrum of creative minds, from early figures such as Muir and Thomas Moran to later observers of the parks such as Ansel Adams, Sylvia Plath, Edward Abbey, and Rick Bass.