Download or read book Ecospectrality written by Laura A. White and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Along with humans and animals, ghosts populate the pages of contemporary Anglophone novels. Analysing novels from across the world-including Australia, Nigeria, South Africa, India, and Jamaica, this book explores how these ghosts can help readers to perceive difficult-to-visualise environmental threats and access marginalised environmental knowledge. Instead of prompting fear, these hauntings foster understanding across species and generations to enable inclusive formulations of environmental justice. Drawing on the latest work in postcolonial ecocriticism, hauntology, and environmental philosophy and such literary texts as GraceLand, No Telephone to Heaven, The Rock Alphabet, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Ecospectrality is an essential read for anyone working in the environmental humanities today.

Download or read book The Literature and Politics of the Environment written by John Parham and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-08-22 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays exploring interrelated strands of material ecologies, past and present British politics, and the act of writing, through a rich variety of case studies.Much as the complexities of climate change and the Anthropocene have queried the limits and exclusions of literary representation, so, too, have the challenges recently presented by climate activism and intersectional environmentalism, animal rights, and even the power of material forms, such as oil, plastic, and heavy metals. Social and protest movements have revived the question of whether there can be such a thing as an activist ecocriticism: can such an approach only concern itself with consciousness, or might it politicise literary criticism in a new way? Attempting to respond, this volume coalesces around three interrelated strands: material ecologies, past and present British politics, and the act of writing itself. Contributors consider the ways in which literary form has foregrounded the complexities of both matter (in essays on water, sugar, and land) and political economics (from empire and nationalism to environmental justice movements and local and regional communities). The volume asks how life writing, nature writing, creative nonfiction, and autobiography - although genres entrenched in capitalist political realities - can also confront these by reinserting personal experience. Can we bring a more sustainable planet into being by focusing on those literary forms which have the ability to imagine the conditions and systems needed to do so? and land) and political economics (from empire and nationalism to environmental justice movements and local and regional communities). The volume asks how life writing, nature writing, creative nonfiction, and autobiography - although genres entrenched in capitalist political realities - can also confront these by reinserting personal experience. Can we bring a more sustainable planet into being by focusing on those literary forms which have the ability to imagine the conditions and systems needed to do so? and land) and political economics (from empire and nationalism to environmental justice movements and local and regional communities). The volume asks how life writing, nature writing, creative nonfiction, and autobiography - although genres entrenched in capitalist political realities - can also confront these by reinserting personal experience. Can we bring a more sustainable planet into being by focusing on those literary forms which have the ability to imagine the conditions and systems needed to do so? and land) and political economics (from empire and nationalism to environmental justice movements and local and regional communities). The volume asks how life writing, nature writing, creative nonfiction, and autobiography - although genres entrenched in capitalist political realities - can also confront these by reinserting personal experience. Can we bring a more sustainable planet into being by focusing on those literary forms which have the ability to imagine the conditions and systems needed to do so?o?

Download or read book Environmental Justice in Early Victorian Literature written by Adrian Tait and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-30 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative new book combines environmental justice scholarship with a material ecocriticism to explore the way in which early Victorian literature (1837–1860) responded to the growing problem of environmental injustice. As this book emphasises, environmental injustice – simply, the convergence of poverty and pollution – was not an isolated phenomenon, but a structural form of inequality; a product of industrial modernity’s radical reformation of British society, it particularly affected the working classes. As each chapter reveals in detail, this form of environmental inequality (or ‘classism’) drew sharply critical reactions from figures as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Engels, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin, and from within the Chartist movement, as working-class writers themselves reacted to the hazardous realities of a divided society. But as this book also reveals, these writers recognised that a truly just society respects the needs of the nonhuman and takes account of the material world in all its own aliveness; even if only tentatively, they reached for a more inclusive, emergent form of justice that might address the social and ecological impacts of industrial modernity, an idea which is no less relevant today. This book represents an indispensable resource for scholars and students working in the fields of Victorian literature, environmental justice, and ecocriticism.

Download or read book Magic Literature and Climate Pedagogy in a Time of Ecological Crisis written by Sofia Ahlberg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-08-22 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Channeling the creative potential of humanity to transition towards joyous and just futures in times of life-threatening climate change, this book uses metaphors of magic and shapeshifting to imagine liveable futures achievable through other-than-rational means. Focusing on a wide range of 20th and 21st-century novels from a diverse range of writers such as Madeline Miller, Jeff VanderMeer, Ursula LeGuin, N.K. Jemisin, Ambelin Kwaymullina and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, it suggests that readers take seriously the pedagogical potential of magic in literature for the classroom and beyond while providing them with contextualized, collective methods of climate action.

Download or read book Digital Vision and the Ecological Aesthetic 1968 2018 written by Lisa FitzGerald and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital technology has transformed the way that we visualise the natural world, the art we create and the stories we tell about our environments. Exploring contemporary digital art and literature through an ecocritical lens, Digital Vision and the Ecological Aesthetic (1968 - 2018) demonstrates the many ways in which critical ideas of the sublime, the pastoral and the picturesque have been renewed and shaped in digital media, from electronic literature to music and the visual arts. The book goes on to explore the ecological implications of these new forms of cultural representation in the digital age and in so doing makes a profound contribution to our understanding of digital art practice in the 21st century.

Download or read book Teaching Environmental Writing written by Isabel Galleymore and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental writing is an increasingly popular literary genre, and a multifaceted genre at that. Recently dominated by works of 'new nature writing', environmental writing includes works of poetry and fiction about the world around us. In the last two decades, universities have begun to offer environmental writing modules and courses with the intention of teaching students skills in the field of writing inspired by the natural world. This book asks how students are being guided into writing about environments. Informed by independently conducted interviews with educators, and a review of existing pedagogical guides, it explores recurring instructions given to students for writing about the environment and compares these pedagogical approaches to the current theory and practice of ecocriticism by scholars such as Ursula Heise and Timothy Morton. Proposing a set of original pedagogical exercises influenced by ecocriticism, the book draws on a number of self-reflexive, environmentally-conscious poets, including Juliana Spahr, Jorie Graham and Les Murray, as creative and stimulating models for teachers and students.

Download or read book Cognitive Ecopoetics written by Sharon Lattig and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New insights from cognitive theory and literary ecocriticism have the power to transform our understanding of one of the most important literary genres: the lyric poem. In Cognitive Ecopoetics, Sharon Lattig brings these two schools of criticism together for the first time to consider the ways in which lyric forms re-enact cognitive processes of the mind and brain. Along the way the book reads anew the long history of the lyric, from Andrew Marvell, through canonical poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson to contemporary writers such as Susan Howe and Charles Olson.

Download or read book Radical Animism written by Jemma Deer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reckoning of climate change calls for us to fundamentally rethink our notions of human centrality, superiority and power. Drawing on a wide range of modern writers and thinkers – from Freud and Darwin to Latour and Derrida, from Shakespeare and Carroll to Woolf and Kafka – Radical Animism develops a new theory of life for a planet in crisis. In this original and timely work, Jemma Deer reframes our thinking of the Anthropocene with ideas from anthropology, astronomy, deconstruction, evolutionary biology, psychoanalysis, quantum physics and veganism. Through readings that are both inventive and compelling, this book shows how 'literary animism' – the active and transformative life of literature – can open our thinking to the immense power of the non-human world.

Download or read book Worldly Spirits Extra Human Dimensions and the Global Anglophone Novel written by Hilary Thompson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-12-28 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging a diverse range of contemporary anglophone literature from authors of the Asian, Middle Eastern and Caribbean diasporas, this book explores how such works turn to spirit forces, spirit realms and spirit beings - were-animals, mystical birds, and snake goddesses - as positive forces that assert perceptual dimensions beyond those of the human, and present a vision of Earth as agentive and animate. With previous scholarship downplaying these aspects of modern works as uncanny hauntings or symptoms of capitalism's or anthropocentrism's destructiveness, or within a blanket rubric of 'magical realism', Hilary Thompson rejects this partitioning of them as products of an exotic East or global South. By contrast, this book builds a new critical framework for analysis of worldly spirits, drawing on anthropological discussions of animism, the newly recovered 1930s boundary-crossing art movement Dimensionism, and multispecies theories of animals' diverse perceptual worlds. Taking stock of novels published from 2018-2020 by such writers as Amitav Ghosh, André Alexis, Yangsze Choo, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Zeyn Joukhadar, and Tanya Tagaq, Thompson illuminates how these works extend an ecological call to decentre the human and align with multidimensional theories of art and literature to provide ways to read for rather than reduce the extra-human dimensions emerging in contemporary fiction. A refreshing rejection of ecological apocalypticism, this book unsettles typical conceptualizations of both anglophone and Anthropocene literatures by invoking European art theory, philosophy, and non-Western ideas on animism and spirits to put forward perceptions of the extra-human as a form of dealing with the many uncertainties of today's different crises.

Download or read book Ecocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction written by Sarah E. McFarland and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work analyzes 21st-century realistic speculations of human extinction: fictions that imagine future worlds without interventions of as-yet uninvented technology, interplanetary travel, or other science fiction elements that provide hope for rescue or long-term survival. Climate change fiction as a genre of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic writing usually resists facing the potentiality of human species extinction, following instead traditional generic conventions that imagine primitivist communities of human survivors with the means of escaping the consequences of global climate change. Yet amidst the ongoing sixth great extinction, works that problematize survival, provide no opportunities for social rebirth, and speculate humanity's final end may address the problem of how to reject the impulse of human exceptionalism that pervades climate change discourse and post-apocalyptic fiction. Rather than following the preferences of the genre, the ecocollapse fictions examined here manifest apocalypse where the means for a happy ending no longer exists. In these texts, diminished ecosystems, specters of cannibalism, and disintegrations of difference and othering render human self-identity as radically malleable within their confrontations with the stark materiality of all life. This book is the first in-depth exploration of contemporary fictions that imagine the imbrication of human and nonhuman within global species extinctions. It closely interrogates novels from authors like Peter Heller, Cormac McCarthy and Yann Martel that reject the impulse of human exceptionalism to demonstrate what it might be like to go extinct.

Download or read book New Forms of Environmental Writing written by Timothy C. Baker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-05-19 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveying a wide range of contemporary poetry, fiction, and memoir by women writers, this book explores our most pressing environmental concerns and shows how these texts find innovative new ways to respond to our environmental crisis. Arguing for the centrality of individual encounter and fragmentary form in 21st-century literature, as well as themes of attention, care, and loss, Baker highlights the ways that fragmentary texts can be seen as a mode of resistance. These texts provide new ways to consider the role of individual agency and enmeshment in a more-than-human world. The author proposes a new model of 'gleaning' to encompass ideas of collection, assemblage, and relinquishment and draws on theoretical perspectives such as ecofeminism, new materialism and posthumanism. Examining works by writers including Sara Baume, Ali Smith, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Bhanu Kapil and Kathleen Jamie, Baker provides important new insights into understanding our planetary predicament.

Download or read book Ecocriticism and Turkey written by Meliz Ergin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-07-11 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Situated between Europe and Asia, and surrounded by three seas, Turkey comprises a diverse environmental and cultural tapestry. Ecocriticism and Turkey is the first in-depth study to explore Turkish literary and cultural engagements with the environment. Ergin examines a wide range of ecocritical issues across four thematically organized chapters: “Sea,” “Climate,” “Routes,” and “Animals.” Each chapter addresses various dimensions of anthropogenic ecological change and highlights the role of literature in inspiring hope and action. The book takes readers on various journeys from the coasts of the Aegean Sea to the mountains of Eastern Anatolia. Ergin converses with both twentieth-century writers to shed new light on familiar texts and contemporary writers to capture emerging perspectives, including Rum, Laz, Kurdish, and Armenian voices in her discussion. The study is further enriched by an interdisciplinary inquiry that brings literature into dialogue with climate science, political history, underwater photography, folk music, and bio-art.

Download or read book Doing Animal Studies with Androids Aliens and Ghosts written by David P. Rando and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-04-06 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring what can be learnt when literary critics in the field of animal studies temporarily direct attention away from representations of nonhuman animals in literature and towards liminal figures like androids, aliens and ghosts, this book examines the boundaries of humanness. Simultaneously, it encourages the reader both to see nonhuman animals afresh and to reimagine the terms of our relationships with them. Examining imaginative texts by writers such as Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson and J. M. Coetzee, this book looks at depictions of androids that redefine traditional humanist qualities such as hope and uniqueness. It examines alien visions that unmask the racist and heteronormative roots of speciesism. And it unpacks examples of ghosts and spirits who offer posthumous visions of having-been-human that decenter anthropocentrism. In doing so, it leaves open the potential for better relationships and futures with nonhuman animals.

Download or read book Reading Underwater Wreckage written by Killian Quigley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting a novel and needed theoretical model for interpreting shipwrecks and other drowned fragments-the histories they tell, and the futures they presage-as junctures of artefact and ecofact, human remains and emergent ecologies, this book puts the environmental humanities, and particularly multispecies studies, in close conversation with literary studies, history, and aesthetic theory. Earth's oceans hold the remains of as many as three million shipwrecks, some thousands of years old. Instead of approaching shipwrecks as either artefacts or “ecofacts,” this book presents a third frame for understanding, one inspired by the material dynamism of sea-floor stuff. As they become encrusted by oceanic matter-some of it living, some inanimate-anthropic fragments participate in a distinctively submarine form of material relation. That relation comprises a wide, and sometimes incalculable, array of things, lives, times, and stories. Drawing from several centuries of literary, philosophical, and scientific encounters with encrustations-as well as from some of the innumerable encrusted “art-forms” that inhabit the sea floor- this book serves anyone in search of better ways to perceive, describe, and imagine submarine matters.

Download or read book The Living World written by Samantha Walton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harnessing new enthusiasm for Nan Shepherd's writing, The Living World asks how literature might help us reimagine humanity's place on earth in the midst of our ecological crisis. The first book to examine Shepherd's writing through an ecocritical lens, it reveals forgotten details about the scientific, political and philosophical climate of early twentieth century Scotland, and offers new insights into Shepherd's distinctive environmental thought. More than this, this book reveals how Shepherd's ways of relating to complex, interconnected ecologies predate many of the core themes and concerns of the multi-disciplinary environmental humanities, and may inform their future development. Broken down into chapters focusing on themes of place, ecology, environmentalism, Deep Time, vital matter and selfhood, The Living World offers the first integrated study of Shepherd's writing and legacy, making the work of this philosopher, feminist, amateur ecologist, geologist, and innovative modernist, accessible and relevant to a new community of readers.

Download or read book Weathering Shakespeare written by Evelyn O'Malley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-24 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the ASLE-UKI 2022 Book Prize From The Pastoral Players' 1884 performance of As You Like It to contemporary site-specific productions activist interventions, there is a rich history of open air performances of Shakespeare's plays beyond their early modern origins. Weathering Shakespeare reveals how new insights from the environmental humanities can transform our understanding of this popular performance practice. Drawing on audience accounts of outdoor productions of those plays most commonly chosen for open air performance – including A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest – the book examines how performers and audiences alike have reacted to unpredictable natural environments.

Download or read book Imagining the Plains of Latin America written by Axel Pérez Trujillo Diniz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pampas lowlands of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil to the Altiplano plateau that stretches between Chile and Peru, the plains of Latin America have haunted the literature and culture of the continent. Bringing these landscapes into focus as a major subject of Latin American culture, this book outlines innovative new ecocritcial readings of canonical literary texts from the 19th century to the present. Tracing these natural landscapes across national borders the book develops a new transnational understanding of Hispanic culture in South America and expands the scope of the contemporary environmental humanities. Texts covered include works by: Ciro Alegría, Manoel de Barros, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Rómulo Gallegos, José Eustasio Rivera, João Guimarães Rosa, and Domingo Sarmiento.