Author: Laura A. White
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350091588
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
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.
Author: John Parham
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846977
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
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?
Author: Sofia Ahlberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350401153
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 169
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Book Description
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.
Author: Meliz Ergin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350125784
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207
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Book Description
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.
Author: Hilary Thompson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350373826
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
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.
Author: Sarah E. McFarland
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350177652
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 165
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Book Description
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.
Author: Timothy C. Baker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350271322
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
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.
Author: Isabel Galleymore
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135006842X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
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.
Author: David P. Rando
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135035614X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
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.
Author: Sharon Lattig
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350069272
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
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.
