Author: Axel Goodbody
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813931630
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 444
Book Description
One of the more frequently lodged, serious, and justifiable complaints about ecocritical work is that it is insufficiently theorized. Ecocritical Theory puts such claims decisively to rest by offering readers a comprehensive collection of sophisticated but accessible essays that productively investigate the relationship between European theory and ecocritique. With its international roster of contributors and subjects, it also militates against the parochialism of ecocritics who work within the limited canon of the American West. Bringing together approaches and orientations based on the work of European philosophers and cultural theorists, this volume is designed to open new pathways for ecocritical theory and practice in the twenty-first century.
Ecocritical Theory
Author: Axel Goodbody
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813931630
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 444
Book Description
One of the more frequently lodged, serious, and justifiable complaints about ecocritical work is that it is insufficiently theorized. Ecocritical Theory puts such claims decisively to rest by offering readers a comprehensive collection of sophisticated but accessible essays that productively investigate the relationship between European theory and ecocritique. With its international roster of contributors and subjects, it also militates against the parochialism of ecocritics who work within the limited canon of the American West. Bringing together approaches and orientations based on the work of European philosophers and cultural theorists, this volume is designed to open new pathways for ecocritical theory and practice in the twenty-first century.
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813931630
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 444
Book Description
One of the more frequently lodged, serious, and justifiable complaints about ecocritical work is that it is insufficiently theorized. Ecocritical Theory puts such claims decisively to rest by offering readers a comprehensive collection of sophisticated but accessible essays that productively investigate the relationship between European theory and ecocritique. With its international roster of contributors and subjects, it also militates against the parochialism of ecocritics who work within the limited canon of the American West. Bringing together approaches and orientations based on the work of European philosophers and cultural theorists, this volume is designed to open new pathways for ecocritical theory and practice in the twenty-first century.
Ecocriticism of the Global South
Author: Scott Slovic
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739189115
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739189115
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
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.
Ecocritical Approaches to Literature in French
Author: Douglas L. Boudreau
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498517323
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Book Description
Ecocriticism is a critical approach that focuses on the representation in literature of the non-human elements of the natural world, a method of inquiry that has been largely limited to literature written in English. The aim of Ecocritical Approaches to Literature in French is twofold: to introduce ecocriticism to scholars of French-language literature, and to open ecocriticism to the vision and voices of French literature.The chapters look at work not only from France, but also from North America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The discussions include fiction, poetry, film and pedagogy. The goal of the collection is to demonstrate not only the applicability of ecocritical inquiry to literature in French, but to demonstrate the possibilities of ecocritical theory on the study of French literature, and also for ecocriticism itself. This collection will be a useful resource both for scholars of French-language literature and also for ecocritics who may have had only limited contact with literatures in languages other than English.
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498517323
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Book Description
Ecocriticism is a critical approach that focuses on the representation in literature of the non-human elements of the natural world, a method of inquiry that has been largely limited to literature written in English. The aim of Ecocritical Approaches to Literature in French is twofold: to introduce ecocriticism to scholars of French-language literature, and to open ecocriticism to the vision and voices of French literature.The chapters look at work not only from France, but also from North America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The discussions include fiction, poetry, film and pedagogy. The goal of the collection is to demonstrate not only the applicability of ecocritical inquiry to literature in French, but to demonstrate the possibilities of ecocritical theory on the study of French literature, and also for ecocriticism itself. This collection will be a useful resource both for scholars of French-language literature and also for ecocritics who may have had only limited contact with literatures in languages other than English.
Romantic Ecocriticism
Author: Dewey W. Hall
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498518028
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies is unique due to its rare assemblage of essays, which has not appeared within an edited collection before. Romantic Ecocriticism is distinct because the essays in the collection develop transnational and transhistorical approaches to the proto-ecological early environmental aspects in British and American Romanticism. First, the edition’s transnational approach is evident through transatlantic connections such as, but are not limited to, comparisons among the following writers: William Wordsworth, William Howitt, and Henry D. Thoreau; John Clare and Aldo Leopold; Charles Darwin and Ralph W. Emerson. Second, the transhistorical approach of RomanticEcocriticism is evident in connections among the following writers: William Wordsworth and Emily Bronte; Thomas Malthus and George Gordon Byron; James Hutton and Percy Shelley; Erasmus Darwin and Charlotte Smith; Gilbert White and Dorothy Wordsworth among others. Thus, Romantic Ecocriticism offers a dynamic collection of essays dedicated to links between scientists and literary figures interested in natural history.
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498518028
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies is unique due to its rare assemblage of essays, which has not appeared within an edited collection before. Romantic Ecocriticism is distinct because the essays in the collection develop transnational and transhistorical approaches to the proto-ecological early environmental aspects in British and American Romanticism. First, the edition’s transnational approach is evident through transatlantic connections such as, but are not limited to, comparisons among the following writers: William Wordsworth, William Howitt, and Henry D. Thoreau; John Clare and Aldo Leopold; Charles Darwin and Ralph W. Emerson. Second, the transhistorical approach of RomanticEcocriticism is evident in connections among the following writers: William Wordsworth and Emily Bronte; Thomas Malthus and George Gordon Byron; James Hutton and Percy Shelley; Erasmus Darwin and Charlotte Smith; Gilbert White and Dorothy Wordsworth among others. Thus, Romantic Ecocriticism offers a dynamic collection of essays dedicated to links between scientists and literary figures interested in natural history.
Feminist Ecocriticism
Author: Douglas A. Vakoch
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 073917682X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170
Book Description
After uncovering the oppressive dichotomies of male/female and nature/culture that underlie contemporary environmental problems, Feminist Ecocriticism focuses specifically on emancipatory strategies employed by ecofeminist literary critics as antidotes, asking what our lives might be like as those strategies become increasingly successful in overcoming oppression. Thus, ecofeminism is not limited to the critique of literature, but also helps identify and articulate liberatory ideals that can be actualized in the real world, in the process transforming everyday life. Providing an alternative to rugged individualism, for example, ecofeminist literature promotes a more fulfilling sense of interrelationship with both community and the land. In the process of exploring literature from ecofeminist perspectives, the book reveals strategies of emancipation that have already begun to give rise to more hopeful ecological narratives.
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 073917682X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170
Book Description
After uncovering the oppressive dichotomies of male/female and nature/culture that underlie contemporary environmental problems, Feminist Ecocriticism focuses specifically on emancipatory strategies employed by ecofeminist literary critics as antidotes, asking what our lives might be like as those strategies become increasingly successful in overcoming oppression. Thus, ecofeminism is not limited to the critique of literature, but also helps identify and articulate liberatory ideals that can be actualized in the real world, in the process transforming everyday life. Providing an alternative to rugged individualism, for example, ecofeminist literature promotes a more fulfilling sense of interrelationship with both community and the land. In the process of exploring literature from ecofeminist perspectives, the book reveals strategies of emancipation that have already begun to give rise to more hopeful ecological narratives.
New International Voices in Ecocriticism
Author: Serpil Oppermann
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498501486
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229
Book Description
With twelve original essays that characterize truly international ecocriticisms, New International Voices in Ecocriticism presents a compendium of ecocritical approaches, including ecocritical theory, ecopoetics, ecocritical analyses of literary, cultural, and musical texts (especially those not commonly studied in mainstream ecocriticism), and new critical vistas on human-nonhuman relations, postcolonial subjects, material selves, gender, and queer ecologies. It develops new perspectives on literature, culture, and the environment. The essays, written by contributors from the United States, Canada, Germany, Turkey, Spain, China, India, and South Africa, cover novels, drama, autobiography, music, and poetry, mixing traditional and popular forms. Popular culture and the production and circulation of cultural imaginaries feature prominently in this volume—how people view their world and the manner in which they share their perspectives, including the way these perspectives challenge each other globally and locally. In this sense the book also probes borders, border transgression, and border permeability. By offering diverse ecocritical approaches, the essays affirm the significance and necessity of international perspectives in environmental humanities, and thus offer unique responses to environmental problems and that, in some sense, affect many beginning and established scholars.
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498501486
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229
Book Description
With twelve original essays that characterize truly international ecocriticisms, New International Voices in Ecocriticism presents a compendium of ecocritical approaches, including ecocritical theory, ecopoetics, ecocritical analyses of literary, cultural, and musical texts (especially those not commonly studied in mainstream ecocriticism), and new critical vistas on human-nonhuman relations, postcolonial subjects, material selves, gender, and queer ecologies. It develops new perspectives on literature, culture, and the environment. The essays, written by contributors from the United States, Canada, Germany, Turkey, Spain, China, India, and South Africa, cover novels, drama, autobiography, music, and poetry, mixing traditional and popular forms. Popular culture and the production and circulation of cultural imaginaries feature prominently in this volume—how people view their world and the manner in which they share their perspectives, including the way these perspectives challenge each other globally and locally. In this sense the book also probes borders, border transgression, and border permeability. By offering diverse ecocritical approaches, the essays affirm the significance and necessity of international perspectives in environmental humanities, and thus offer unique responses to environmental problems and that, in some sense, affect many beginning and established scholars.
Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity
Author: Christopher Schliephake
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498532853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391
Book Description
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 humanity’s 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 “nature” and humanity’s 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.
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498532853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391
Book Description
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 humanity’s 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 “nature” and humanity’s 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.
Ecocritical Theory
Author: Axel Goodbody
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813931355
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 333
Book Description
Passing glories and romantic retrievals: avant-garde nostalgia and hedonist renewal / Kate Soper -- Green things in the garbage: ecocritical gleaning in Walter Benjamin's arcades / Catriona Sandilands -- Raymond Williams: materialism and ecocriticism / Martin Ryle -- Sense of place and lieu de mémoire: a cultural memory approach to environmental texts / Axel Goodbody -- From literary anthropology to cultural ecology: German ecocritical theory since Wolfgang Iser / Timo Müller -- The social theory of Norbert Elias and the question of the nonhuman world / Linda Williams -- From the modern to the ecological: Latour on Walden pond / Laura Dassow Walls -- Martin Heidegger, D.H. Lawrence, and poetic attention to being / Trevor Norris -- Merleau-Ponty's ecophenomenology / Louise Westling -- Gernot Böhme's ecological aesthetics of atmosphere / Kate Rigby -- Dialoguing with Bakhtin over our ethical responsibility to anothers / Patrick D. Murphy -- Coexistence and coexistents: ecology without a world / Timothy Morton -- The matter of texts: a material intertextuality and ecocritical engagements with the Bible / Anne Elvey -- There can be no democracy without a culture of difference / Luce Irigaray -- The ecological Irigaray? / Christopher Cohoon -- Cybernetics and social systems theory / Hannes Bergthaller -- Ecocentric postmodern theory: interrelations between ecological, quantum, and postmodern theories / Serpil Oppermann -- Affinity studies and open systems: a non-equilibrium, ecocritical reading of Goethe's Faust / Heather I. Sullivan -- Blake, Deleuze, and the emergence of ecological consciousness / Mark Lussier -- The biosemiotic turn: Abduction, or, the nature of creative reason in nature and culture / Wendy Wheeler.
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813931355
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 333
Book Description
Passing glories and romantic retrievals: avant-garde nostalgia and hedonist renewal / Kate Soper -- Green things in the garbage: ecocritical gleaning in Walter Benjamin's arcades / Catriona Sandilands -- Raymond Williams: materialism and ecocriticism / Martin Ryle -- Sense of place and lieu de mémoire: a cultural memory approach to environmental texts / Axel Goodbody -- From literary anthropology to cultural ecology: German ecocritical theory since Wolfgang Iser / Timo Müller -- The social theory of Norbert Elias and the question of the nonhuman world / Linda Williams -- From the modern to the ecological: Latour on Walden pond / Laura Dassow Walls -- Martin Heidegger, D.H. Lawrence, and poetic attention to being / Trevor Norris -- Merleau-Ponty's ecophenomenology / Louise Westling -- Gernot Böhme's ecological aesthetics of atmosphere / Kate Rigby -- Dialoguing with Bakhtin over our ethical responsibility to anothers / Patrick D. Murphy -- Coexistence and coexistents: ecology without a world / Timothy Morton -- The matter of texts: a material intertextuality and ecocritical engagements with the Bible / Anne Elvey -- There can be no democracy without a culture of difference / Luce Irigaray -- The ecological Irigaray? / Christopher Cohoon -- Cybernetics and social systems theory / Hannes Bergthaller -- Ecocentric postmodern theory: interrelations between ecological, quantum, and postmodern theories / Serpil Oppermann -- Affinity studies and open systems: a non-equilibrium, ecocritical reading of Goethe's Faust / Heather I. Sullivan -- Blake, Deleuze, and the emergence of ecological consciousness / Mark Lussier -- The biosemiotic turn: Abduction, or, the nature of creative reason in nature and culture / Wendy Wheeler.
Urban Ecologies
Author: Christopher Schliephake
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 073919576X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 269
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 073919576X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 269
Book Description
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.
Ecocriticism in Taiwan
Author: Chia-ju Chang
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498538282
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Ecocriticism is a mode of interdisciplinary critical inquiry into the relationship between cultural production, society, and the environment. The field advocates for the more-than-human realm as well as for underprivileged human and non-human groups and their perspectives. Taiwan is one of the earliest centers for promoting ecocriticism outside the West and has continued to play a central role in shaping ecocriticism in East Asia. This is the first English anthology dedicated to the vibrant development of ecocriticism in Taiwan. It provides a window to Taiwan’s important contributions to international ecocriticism, especially an emerging “vernacular” trend in the field emphasizing the significance of local perspectives and styles, including non-western vocabularies, aesthetics, cosmologies, and political ideologies. Taiwan's unique history, geographic location, geology, and subtropical climate generate locale-specific, vernacular thinking about island ecology and environmental history, as well as global environmental issues such as climate change, dioxin pollution, species extinction, energy decisions, pollution, and environmental injustice. In hindsight, Taiwan's industrial modernization no longer appears as a success narrative among Asia's “Four Little Dragons,” but as a cautionary tale revealing the brute force entrepreneurial exploitation of the land and the people. In this light, this volume can be seen as a critical response to Taiwan's postcolonial, capitalist-industrial modernity, as manifested in the scholars’ readings of Taiwan's "mountain and river," ocean, animal, and aboriginal (non)fictional narratives, environmental documentaries, and art installations. This volume is endowed with a mixture of ecocosmopolitan and indigenous sensitivities. Though dominated by the Han Chinese ethnic group and its Confucian ideology, Taiwan is a place of complicated ethnic identities and affiliations. The succession of changing colonial and political regimes, made even more complex by the island’s sixteen aboriginal groups and several diasporic subcultures (South Asian immigrants, Western expatriates, and diverse immigrants from the Chinese mainland), has led to an ongoing quest for political and cultural identity. This complexity urges Taiwan-based ecoscholars to pay attention to the diasporic, comparative, and intercultural dimensions of local specificity, either based on their own diasporic experience or the cosmopolitan features of the Taiwanese texts they scrutinize. This cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic is a key contribution Taiwan has to offer current ecocritical scholarship.
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498538282
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Ecocriticism is a mode of interdisciplinary critical inquiry into the relationship between cultural production, society, and the environment. The field advocates for the more-than-human realm as well as for underprivileged human and non-human groups and their perspectives. Taiwan is one of the earliest centers for promoting ecocriticism outside the West and has continued to play a central role in shaping ecocriticism in East Asia. This is the first English anthology dedicated to the vibrant development of ecocriticism in Taiwan. It provides a window to Taiwan’s important contributions to international ecocriticism, especially an emerging “vernacular” trend in the field emphasizing the significance of local perspectives and styles, including non-western vocabularies, aesthetics, cosmologies, and political ideologies. Taiwan's unique history, geographic location, geology, and subtropical climate generate locale-specific, vernacular thinking about island ecology and environmental history, as well as global environmental issues such as climate change, dioxin pollution, species extinction, energy decisions, pollution, and environmental injustice. In hindsight, Taiwan's industrial modernization no longer appears as a success narrative among Asia's “Four Little Dragons,” but as a cautionary tale revealing the brute force entrepreneurial exploitation of the land and the people. In this light, this volume can be seen as a critical response to Taiwan's postcolonial, capitalist-industrial modernity, as manifested in the scholars’ readings of Taiwan's "mountain and river," ocean, animal, and aboriginal (non)fictional narratives, environmental documentaries, and art installations. This volume is endowed with a mixture of ecocosmopolitan and indigenous sensitivities. Though dominated by the Han Chinese ethnic group and its Confucian ideology, Taiwan is a place of complicated ethnic identities and affiliations. The succession of changing colonial and political regimes, made even more complex by the island’s sixteen aboriginal groups and several diasporic subcultures (South Asian immigrants, Western expatriates, and diverse immigrants from the Chinese mainland), has led to an ongoing quest for political and cultural identity. This complexity urges Taiwan-based ecoscholars to pay attention to the diasporic, comparative, and intercultural dimensions of local specificity, either based on their own diasporic experience or the cosmopolitan features of the Taiwanese texts they scrutinize. This cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic is a key contribution Taiwan has to offer current ecocritical scholarship.