Bøker i Ecocritical Theory and Practice-serien

Throughout the world, people spend much of their time with animal companions of various kinds, frequently with cats and dogs. What meanings do we make of these relationships? In the ecocritical collection Reading cats and Dogs, a diverse array of scholars considers the philosophy, literature, and film devoted to human relationships with companion species. In addition to illuminating famous animal stories by Beatrix Potter, Jack London, Italo Svevo, and Michael Ondaatje, readers are introduced to the dog poems of Shuntarō Tanikawa, a Turkish documentary on stray cats as neighborhood companions, and the representation of diverse animal companions in Cameroonian novels. Focusing on “Stray and Feral Companions,” “The Usefulness of Companion Animals,” and “Problematizing Companion Animals,” Reading Cats and Dogs aims both to confirm and topple readers’ assumptions about the fellow travelers with whom we share our lives, our streets and fields, and our planet. Fifteen contributors from various countries reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and psychological complexities of our multispecies relationships, demonstrating the richness of ecocritical animal studies.

The book covers the medieval Turkic societies' assiduous commitment to build spiritually significant and uninterrupted relationships with nonhuman animals, showing animals' active participation in the evolution of humans' communal identities, codes of behavior, and spiritual and emotional lives.

Nicole C. Dittmer offers a reimagining of the popular Gothic female ';monster' figure in early-to-mid-Victorian literature. Regardless of the extensive scholarship concerning monstrosities, these pre-fin-de-siecle figurations have often been neglected by critical studies or interpreted as fragments of mind and body which create a division between culture and nature. In Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism, Dittmer deploys monism to delineate from and contest such dualism, unifies the material-immaterial aspects of fictional women, and blurs the distinction between nature-culture. Blending intertextual disciplines of medical sciences, ecofeminism, and fiction, she exposes female monstrosities as material and semiotic figurations. This book, then, identifies how women in the Victorian Gothic are informed by the entanglement of both immaterial discourses and material conditions. When repressed by social customs, the monistic mind-body of the material-semiotic figure reacts to and disrupts processes of ontology, transforming women into ';wild' and ';monstrous' (re)presentations.

This book establishes how ecopoetics can provide insight into the poetic echoes of the living earth that are diffracted in environmental fiction, encouraging a reenchantment that adheres to postmodern science, while braiding various onto-epistemological threads. It reentangles...

Throughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential differencerather than a porous transitionbetween the human and animal. Attempts to assign essential properties to humans (e.g., language, reason, or morality) often reflected ulterior aims to defend a privileged position for humans..This book shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the questions ';What is human?' and ';What is animal?' What makes this collection unique is that it fills a lacuna in critical animal studies and the growing field of ecocriticism. It is the first collection that establishes a productive encounter between philosophical perspectives on the humananimal boundary and those that draw on fictional literature. The objective is to establish a dialogue between those disciplines with the goal of expanding the imaginative scope of human-animal relationships. The contributions thus do not only trace and deconstruct the boundaries dividing humans and nonhuman animals, they also present the reader with alternative perspectives on the porous continuum and surprising reversal of what appears as human and what as nonhuman.

Dike Okoro analyzes the various manifestations of ecocriticism and political activism in the poetry of Lupenga Mphande, who is arguably Africa's first poet to explore the existence of territorial cults and natural shrines. This book is recommended for students and scholars seeking new interpretations of the African experience in contemporary world literature.

Avian Aesthetics in Literature and Culture challenges species centrism through essays that bridge various environment-focused perspectives and methodologies.

In Shamanism in the Contemporary Novel, Özlem Ö¿üt Yaz¿c¿ölu examines shamanism as a significant trope in a selection of contemporary novels. Yaz¿c¿ölu finds that these works ultimately challenge anthropocentric and androcentric discourses and offer alternative perspectives for social and environmental justice on an endangered planet.

Taking up the collective insistence on the centrality of story to extinction studies, this volume engages with what is traditionally understood as Anthropocene fiction and highlights the questions these fictions ask of extinction, while simultaneously bringing texts typically not thought of as Anthropocene fiction into fruitful discourse.

This edited collection examines the ecological and cultural dynamics of humanarboreal kinship in environmental literature and art.

This book examines how Hawthorne's notebooks provide a key for understanding the environmental elements of his fiction writing. Hawthorne's four major romances are the main focus of study, but his short fiction and nonfiction also show a man convinced that human and nonhuman nature are inextricably intertwined.

This book explores how the tremendous earthquake on March 11, 2011 impacted literary authors in Japan and generated issues and perspectives previously unrecognized in Japanese literary and social culture. The disaster itself caused an earthquake, tsunami, and an nuclear accident, and provided the grounds for "post 3/11" literature in Japan.

This volume explores the relationship in postwar American literature between masculinity and place, tracing the development of the 'domesticated man' of midcentury and the continual subversion of this established vision of masculinity by alternate systems of symbols and ecological consciousness.

An Island in the Stream, a collaboration between Cuban and American writers and scholars, is a diverse collection of ecocritical and literary responses to the natural environment in Cuba and to Cuban environmental culture.

Environmental Postcolonialism investigates the environmental ramifications of colonialism and furnishes a hopeful ecocritical vision of a postcolonial world.

Deserts are highly emblematic spaces: dry, barren, isolated. In literary and cinematic representations, they often betoken collapse and dystopia. Reading Aridity in Western American Literature offer readings of literature set in the US Southwest from ecocritical and new materialist perspectives. The volume explores the diverse epistemologies, histories, relationships, futures, and possibilities that emerge from the representation of American deserts in fiction, film, and literary art. The authors, as well, trace the social, cultural, economic, and biotic narratives that foreground deserts, and how these underscore the challenges of climate change, ecojustice, and human and non-human flourishing. As such, the volume rethinks what deserts are and provides a constructive lens for seeing deserts as more than blank spaces, rather as ecogeographies that challenge, critique, and urge collective ecojustice action.

Avenging Nature explores how nature strikes back against human domination. International experts examine, from a multipdisciplinary perspective, the insubordinate representations of nature in modern and contemporary art and literature, and advocate for the insurgence of nature within and outside the realm of culture.

Turkish Ecocriticism affirms the relevance and necessity of Turkish perspectives in environmental literatures and arts, and explores the rich historical and contemporary ecoliterary and ecosocial traditions of Turkey.

Dwellings of Enchantment probes literature and cues humans to experience awe, love, and respect for our wonderfully complex, multispecies home. Interweaving new materialist, postcolonial, ecopoetic, ecofeminist ,and ecopsychological approaches, it delves into various ontologies, literary modes, and tropes framing our coevolution within the oikos.

Rhetorical Animals explores what the study of communication and persuasion would look like if it included the voices of all persuasive species, from the microscopic gut bacteria to the charismatic megafauna we know so well.

Focusing on the concept of "dark ecology" and its invitation to add an anti-pastoral perspective to ecocriticism, this collection of essays on American literature and culture offers examples of how a vision of nature's darker side can create a fuller understanding of humanity's relation to nature.

The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times illuminates the ways in which the garden as a real and imagined space, and gardening as a practice or ethic, is changed under extreme conditions of economic and environmental austerity.

This book promotes Christian ecology and animal ethics from the perspectives of the Bible, science, and the Judeo-Christian tradition. In an age of climate change, how do we protect species and individual animals? Does it matter how we treat bugs? How does understanding the Trinity and Christ''s self-emptying nature help us to be more responsible earth caretakers? What do Christian ethics have to do with hunting? How do the Foxfire books of Southern Appalachia help us to love a place? Does ecology need a place at the pulpit and in hymns? How do Catholic approaches, past and present, help us appreciate and respond to the created world? Finally, how does Jesus respond to humans, nonhumans, and environmental concerns in the Gospel of Mark?

TodayΓÇÖs highly industrialized and technologically controlled global food systems dominate our lives, shaping our access and attitudes towards food and deeply influencing and defining our identities. At the same time, these food systems are profoundly and destructively impacting the health of the environment and threatening all of us, human and nonhuman, who must subsist in ecological conditions of increasing fragility and scarcity. This collection examines and exposes the myriad ways that the food systems, driven by global commodity capitalism and its imperative of growth at any cost, increasingly controls us and conforms us to our roles as consumers and producers. This collection covers a range of topics from the excess of consumers in the post-industrial world and the often unacknowledged yet intrinsic connection of their consumption to the growing ecological and health crises in developing nations, to topics of surveillance and control of human and nonhuman bodies through food, to the deep linkages of cultural values and norms toward food to the myriad crises we face on a global scale.

Thinking about Animals in the Age of the Anthropocene makes connections between the Anthropocene discourse and human-animal studies, thus facilitating further interdisciplinary work on the topic of animals in the Anthropocene.

The Green Thread is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that takes the risk of departing from the long-standing human perception of plants- including autonomy, agency, and consciousness-to explore new territories where the re-conceptualization of vegetable beings as active agents in social and cultural environments becomes possible.

This book examines the often-complex relationships between issues of gender and the environment in science fiction films and fiction. Its contributors discuss a range of texts: early apocalyptic science fiction, campy midcentury science fiction films, Silver Age superhero comics, and twenty-first-century science fiction films and literature.

Taking up the collective insistence on the centrality of story to extinction studies, this volume engages with what is traditionally understood as Anthropocene fiction and highlights the questions these fictions ask of extinction, while simultaneously bringing texts typically not thought of as Anthropocene fiction into fruitful discourse.

Ecocriticism in Japan provides an answer to the question, "What can ecocriticism do when engaging with Japanese literature and culture?" Engaging works ranging from The Tale of Genji to Abe, Oe, Ishimure, and Miyazaki, this volume examines works Japanese people and culture in terms of nature and environment.

The philosophy of existentialism is undergoing an ecological renewal, as global warming, mass extinction, and other signs of the planetary scale of human actions are making it glaringly apparent that existence is always ecological coexistence. One of the most urgent problems in the current ecological emergency is that humans cannot bear to face the emergency. Its earth-shattering implications are ignored in favor of more solutions, fixes, and sustainability transitions. Solutions cannot solve much when they cannot face what it means to be human amidst unprecedented uncertainty and intimate interconnectedness. Attention to such uncertainty and interconnectedness is what ecological existentialism (Deborah Bird Rose) or coexistentialism (Timothy Morton) is all about. This book follows Rose, Morton, and many others (e.g., Jean-Luc Nancy, Peter Sloterdijk, and Luce Irigaray) who are currently taking up the styles of thinking conveyed in existentialism, renewing existentialist affirmations of experience, paradox, uncertainty, and ambiguity, and extending existentialism beyond humans to include attention to the uniqueness and strangeness of all beingsall humans and nonhumans woven into ecological coexistence. Along the way, coexistentialism finds productive alliances and tensions amidst many areas of inquiry, including ecocriticism, ecological humanities, object-oriented ontology, feminism, phenomenology, deconstruction, new materialism, and more. This is a book for anyone who seeks to refute cynicism and loneliness and affirm coexistence.