Download or read book A Global History of Literature and the Environment written by John Parham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Global History of Literature and the Environment, an international group of scholars illustrate the immense riches of environmental writing from the earliest literary periods down to the present. It addresses ancient writings about human/animal/plant relations from India, classical Greece, Chinese and Japanese literature, the Maya Popol Vuh, Islamic texts, medieval European works, eighteenth-century and Romantic ecologies, colonial/postcolonial environmental interrelations, responses to industrialization, and the emerging literatures of the world in the present Anthropocene moment. Essays range from Trinidad to New Zealand, Estonia to Brazil. Discussion of these texts indicates a variety of ways environmental criticism can fruitfully engage literary works and cultures from every continent and every historical period. This is a uniquely varied and rich international history of environmental writing from ancient Mesopotamian and Asian works to the present. It provides a compelling account of a topic that is crucial to twenty-first-century global literary studies.
Download or read book Literature and the Environment written by George Hart and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-07-30 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phrase literature and environment only achieved popularity in recent decades, yet writers dating back to the explorers of the 1500s—and later such 19th-century Romanticists as Thoreau—have long been addressing environmental issues through literary expression. This volume introduces students and educators to the field by tracing the evolution of environmental writing in the United States. Chapters written by distinguished scholars offer new perspectives on important environmental issues, guiding readers through 11 carefully selected literary works. Each chapter provides brief biographical information on the author, discussions of the work's structural, thematic, and stylistic components, and insights into the historical context that relates the work to relevant environmental issues. Each chapter concludes with information on works cited. The analyzed works cover a wide spectrum of literature and span nearly 100 years. Included are early writings, such as Mary Austin's 1903 The Land of Little Rain, and famous groundbreaking works, such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and Gary Snyder's Turtle Island (1974). Also included are frequently assigned works of special interest to students, such as The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), The Earthsea Trilogy (1977), and Ceremony (1977). A list of selected further suggested readings completes the volume. Students of literature, as well as educators looking for new ways to present social issues, will find many ideas and much inspiration in this volume.
Download or read book Climate Change and the Course of Global History written by John L. Brooke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-17 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first global study by a historian to fully integrate the earth-system approach of the new climate science with the material history of humanity.
Download or read book The Long Shadows written by Simo Laakkonen and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Long Shadows is the first book to offer global perspectives on the environmental history of World War II. Based on long-term research, the selected essays represent the best available studies in different fields and countries. With contributions touching on Europe, America, Asia, and Africa, the book has a truly global approach. The Long Shadows considers the profound and lasting impact World War II has had on global environments, encompassing polar, temperate, and tropical ecological zones. The first section of the book offers an introduction to and holistic overview of the war. The second section examines the social and environmental impacts of the conflict, while the third focuses on the history and legacy of resource extraction. A final section offers conclusions and hypotheses. Numerous themes and topics are explored in these previously unpublished essays, including the control of typhus fever, the environmental policies of the Third Reich, Japanese imperialism and marine resources, and the new and innovative field of acoustic ecology. Aimed at researchers and students in the fields of environmental history, military history, and global history, The Long Shadows will also appeal to general readers interested in the environmental impact of the greatest military conflict in the history of the world. Book jacket.
Download or read book Caribbean Literature and the Environment written by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the literatures of the Caribbean from an ecocritical perspective in all language areas of the region. This book explores the ways in which the history of transplantation and settlement has provided unique challenges and opportunities for establishing a sense of place and an environmental ethic in the Caribbean.
Download or read book Civilizing Nature written by Bernhard Gissibl and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National parks are one of the most important and successful institutions in global environmentalism. Since their first designation in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s they have become a global phenomenon. The development of these ecological and political systems cannot be understood as a simple reaction to mounting environmental problems, nor can it be explained by the spread of environmental sensibilities. Shifting the focus from the usual emphasis on national parks in the United States, this volume adopts an historical and transnational perspective on the global geography of protected areas and its changes over time. It focuses especially on the actors, networks, mechanisms, arenas, and institutions responsible for the global spread of the national park and the associated utilization and mobilization of asymmetrical relationships of power and knowledge, contributing to scholarly discussions of globalization and the emergence of global environmental institutions and governance.
Download or read book Global Literature and the Environment written by Matthew Whittle and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-02 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global Literature and the Environment analyses literatures from across the world that connect readers to the localized impacts of the climate and ecological emergencies. The book contextualizes ecological breakdown within the history of imperialist-capitalism, exploring how literature helps us to imagine and create a habitable and just world for all forms of life. The four chapters are organised according to the elements of the climate system that are at risk. ‘Earth’ examines Caribbean, American, South African, and British literatures that explore how dominant human groups have exploited soils, minerals, metals, and oil in pursuit of economic aims. ‘Water’ engages with poetic representations of, and responses to, extraction, pollution, and global warming in the fresh- and saltwaters of Nigeria and the icescapes of Alaska. ‘Air’ analyses prose and poetry that depicts atmospheric pollution caused by gas flaring in the Niger Delta and the production of pesticides in India. ‘Life’ attends to the ways in which literature contextualizes the drivers of, and proposed solutions to, mass species extinction across North America, Africa, Australasia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. This accessible and engaging book explores novels, plays and poetry by writers including Octavia Butler, C.L.R. James, dg nanouk okpik, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Imbolo Mbue, Indra Sinha, Witi Ihimaera, J.M. Coetzee, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, amongst many others. It introduces readers to the concept of the Anthropocene alongside perspectives that challenge the assumption that the climate crisis is caused by an undifferentiated humanity. In doing so, the book draws on, and combines, a range of theoretical approaches, including postcolonialism, Indigenous studies, ecocriticism, cultural materialism, and animal studies.
Download or read book Portuguese Literature and the Environment written by Victor K. Mendes and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-06-03 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portuguese Literature and the Environment explores the relationship between Portuguese literature and the environment from Medieval times to the present. From the centrality of nature in Medieval poetry, through the bucolic verse of the Renaissance, all the way to the Romantic and post-Romantic nostalgia for a pristine natural or rural landscape under threat in the wake of industrialization, Portuguese literature has frequently reflected on the connection between humans and the natural world. More recently, the postcolonial turn in contemporary literature has highlighted the contrast between the environment of the former colonies and that of Portugal. Contributors to the collection examine how Portuguese writers engage with the environment and have incorporated nature in their texts not only to prompt social, political or philosophical reflections on human society, but also as a way to learn from non-humans. The book is organized into three sections. The first explores the relationship between Portuguese philosophy, historiography, culture, and environmental issues. The second section discusses the link between literary texts and the environment from the Renaissance to 1900. The final section analyzes the connection between literary movements or specific authors and environmental change from 1900 to today. Scholars of literature, Latin American studies, literature, and environmental studies will find this volume especially useful.
Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment written by Timothy Clark and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-06 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The degrading environment of the planet is something that touches everyone. This 2011 book offers an introductory overview of literary and cultural criticism that concerns environmental crisis in some form. Both as a way of reading texts and as a theoretical approach to culture more generally, 'ecocriticism' is a varied and fast-changing set of practices which challenges inherited thinking and practice in the reading of literature and culture. This introduction defines what ecocriticism is, its methods, arguments and concepts, and will enable students to look at texts in a wholly new way. Boxed sections explain key critical terms and contemporary debates in the field with 'hands-on' examples and comparisons. Timothy Clark's thoughtful approach makes this an ideal first encounter with environmental readings of literature.
Download or read book Writing the Environment in Nineteenth Century American Literature written by Steven Petersheim and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-09-17 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth-century roots of environmental writing in American literature are often mentioned in passing and sometimes studied piece by piece. Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature brings together numerous explorations of environmentally-aware writing across the genres of nineteenth-century literature. Like Lawrence Buell, the authors of this collection find Thoreau’s writing a touchstone of nineteenth-century environmental writing, particularly focusing on Thoreau’s claim that humans may function as “scribes of nature.” However, these studies of Thoreau’s antecedents, contemporaries, and successors also reveal a range of other writers in the nineteenth century whose literary treatments of nature are often more environmentally attuned than most readers have noticed. The writers whose works are studied in this collection include canonical and forgotten writers, men and women, early nineteenth-century and late nineteenth-century authors, pioneers and conservationists. They drew attention to the conflicted relationships between humans and the American continent, as experienced by Native Americans and European Americans. Taken together, these essays offer a fresh perspective on the roots of environmental literature in nineteenth-century American nonfiction, fiction, and poetry as well as in multi-genre compositions such as the travel writings of Margaret Fuller. Bringing largely forgotten voices such as John Godman alongside canonical voices such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, the authors whose writings are studied in this collection produced a diverse tapestry of nascent American environmental writing in the nineteenth-century. From early nineteenth-century writers such as poet Philip Freneau and novelist Charles Brockden Brown to later nineteenth-century conservationists such as John James Audubon and John Muir, Scribes of Nature shows the development of an environmental consciousness and a growing conservationist ethos in American literature. Given their often surprisingly healthy respect for the natural environment, these nineteenth-century writers offer us much to consider in an age of environmental crisis. The complexities of the supposed nature/culture divide still work into our lives today as economic and environmental issues are often seen at loggerheads when they ought to be seen as part of the same conversation of what it means to live healthy lives, and to pass on a healthy world to those who follow us in a world where human activity is becoming increasingly threatening to the health of our planet.
Download or read book The Environmental Imagination written by Lawrence Buell and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Thoreau’s Walden as a touchstone, Buell offers an account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of Western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more “ecocentric” way of being. In doing so, he provides a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature.
Download or read book The Disposition of Nature written by Jennifer Wenzel and published by . This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how literature shapes understandings of nature and can therefore be both complicit in environmental harm and part of an environmentalist practice. The book devotes particular attention to formerly colonized regions (e.g. Africa and South Asia) in order to understand the relationships among imperialism, globalization, and environmental injustice.
Download or read book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor written by Rob Nixon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Groundbreaking in its call to reconsider our approach to the slow rhythm of time in the very concrete realms of environmental health and social justice.” —Wold Literature Today The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode. In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
Download or read book Italy and the Environmental Humanities written by Serenella Iovino and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together new writing by some of the field’s most compelling voices from the United States and Europe, this is the first book to examine Italy--as a territory of both matter and imagination--through the lens of the environmental humanities. The contributors offer a wide spectrum of approaches--including ecocriticism, film studies, environmental history and sociology, eco-art, and animal and landscape studies--to move past cliché and reimagine Italy as a hybrid, plural, eloquent place. Among the topics investigated are post-seismic rubble and the stratifying geosocial layers of the Anthropocene, the landscape connections in the work of writers such as Calvino and Buzzati, the contaminated fields of the ecomafia’s trafficking, Slow Food’s gastronomy of liberation, poetic birds and historic forests, resident parasites, and nonhuman creatures. At a time when the tension between the local and the global requires that we reconsider our multiple roots and porous place-identities, Italy and the Environmental Humanities builds a creative critical discourse and offers a series of new voices that will enrich not just nationally oriented discussions, but the entire debate on environmental culture. Contributors: Marco Armiero, Royal Institute of Technology at Stockholm * Franco Arminio, Writer, poet, and filmmaker * Patrick Barron, University of Massachusetts * Damiano Benvegnù, Dartmouth College and the Oxford Center for Animal Ethics * Viktor Berberi, University of Minnesota, Morris * Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University * Luca Bugnone, University of Turin * Enrico Cesaretti, University of Virginia *Almo Farina, University of Urbino * Sophia Maxine Farmer, University of Wisconsin-Madison * Serena Ferrando, Colby College * Tiziano Fratus, Writer, poet, and tree-seeker * Matteo Gilebbi, Duke University * Andrea Hajek, University of Warwick * Marcus Hall, University of Zurich * Serenella Iovino, University of Turin * Andrea Lerda, freelance curator * Roberto Marchesini, Study Center of Posthuman Philosophy in Bologna * Marco Moro, Editor-in-Chief of Edizioni Ambiente, Milan * Elena Past, Wayne State University * Carlo Petrini, Founder of International Slow Food Movement * Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, Miami University (Ohio)* Monica Seger, College of William and Mary * Pasquale Verdicchio, University of California, San Diego
Download or read book Shrimp written by Yvette Florio Lane and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The small-but-mighty shrimp has lured diners to the table for centuries. Whether served as the featured protein in a main dish or as a savory flavor in snacks, shrimp are the world’s most popular seafood. These primordial-looking creatures spend their short lives out of sight, deep on the ocean floor, yet they have inspired an immense passion in cultures across the world. In this lively and entertaining book, Yvette Florio Lane embarks on a lively historical tour of the production and consumption of Earth’s beloved crustacean. Over the centuries, shrimp have been hailed as an indulgence, a luxury, and even an aphrodisiac. They have been served to show hospitality, demonstrate status, and celebrate special occasions. They can also be culinary ambassadors, inspiring novel cooking techniques and the introduction of new tastes around the world. Demand for the creatures, however, has now exceeded supply. Whether fished from the ocean with nets or deep-sea trawlers, or raised in modern aquaculture farms, the world produces and eats more (and cheaper) shrimp than ever before, but often at great cost. Shrimp is a delicious, fascinating, and troubling history of a culinary favorite.
Download or read book The Great Derangement written by Amitav Ghosh and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-07-24 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements. Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.
Download or read book Writing for an Endangered World written by Lawrence Buell and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The environmental imagination does not stop short at the edge of the woods. Nor should our understanding of it, as Lawrence Buell makes powerfully clear in his new book that aims to reshape the field of literature and environmental studies. Emphasizing the influence of the physical environment on individual and collective perception, his book thus provides the theoretical underpinnings for an ecocriticism now reaching full power, and does so in remarkably clear and concrete ways. Writing for an Endangered World offers a conception of the physical environment--whether built or natural--as simultaneously found and constructed, and treats imaginative representations of it as acts of both discovery and invention. A number of the chapters develop this idea through parallel studies of figures identified with either "natural" or urban settings: John Muir and Jane Addams; Aldo Leopold and William Faulkner; Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Dreiser; Wendell Berry and Gwendolyn Brooks. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, but ranging freely across national borders, his book reimagines city and country as a single complex landscape.
