Since the dawn of human artistic and cultural expression, the natural world and our complex and often vexed relationships with the other-than-human have been essential themes in such expression. This series seeks to offer an encompassing approach to literary explorations of environmental experiences and ideas, reaching from the earliest known literatures to the twenty-first century and accounting for vernacular approaches throughout the world. In recent decades, it has become clear that highly localized, non-Western forms of literary expression and scholarly analysis have much to contribute to ecocritical understanding—such studies, as well as examinations of European and North American literatures, are encouraged. Comparative treatments of literary works from different cultures, cultural expression in various media (including literature and connections with visual and performing arts, ecocinema, music, videogames, and material culture), and interdisciplinary scholarly methodologies would be ideal contributions to the series. What are the lessons regarding human-animal kinship that can be gleaned from indigenous songs in Africa, Amazonia, Oceania, the Americas, and other regions of the world? Which discourses of toxicity in the urban centers of contemporary East Asia and the post-industrial brownscapes of Europe and America might gain traction as we seek to balance human and ecological health and robust economies? What are some of the Third World expressions of postcolonial ecocriticism, posthumanism, material ecocriticism, gender-based ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and other avant-garde trends? How do basic concepts such as "wilderness" or "animal rights" or "pollution" find expression in diverse environmental voices and become imbricated with questions of caste, class, gender, politics, and ethnicity? The global circulation of culturally diverse texts provides resources for understanding and engaging with the environmental crisis. This series aims to provide a home for projects demonstrating both traditional and experimental approaches in environmental literary studies.
Series Editors:
Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA
Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Previous Editors:
Matthew Wynn Sivils, Iowa State University, USA
By Simon Estok
December 18, 2020
The Ecophobia Hypothesis grows out of the sense that while the theory of biophilia has productively addressed ideal human affinities with nature, the capacity of “the biophilia hypothesis” as an explanatory model of human/ environment relations is limited. The biophilia hypothesis cannot adequately...
By Julia E. Daniel, Margaret Konkol
May 05, 2020
Modernism in the Green traces a trans-Atlantic modernist fascination with the creation, use, and representation of the modern green. From the verdant public commons in the heart of cities to the lookout points on mountains in national parks, planned green spaces serve as felicitous stages for the ...
Edited
By Ilka Kressner, Ana María Mutis, Elizabeth Pettinaroli
November 27, 2019
Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World brings together critical studies of Latin American and Latinx writing, film, visual, and performing arts to offer new perspectives on ecological violence. Building on Rob Nixon’s concept of "slow violence," the ...
By Julie Hudson
August 12, 2019
The Environment on Stage: Scenery or Shapeshifter? investigates a pertinent voice of theatrical performance within the production and reception of ecotheatre. Theatre ecologies, unavoidably enmeshed in the environment, describe the system of sometimes perverse feedback loops running through ...
By Pramod K. Nayar
May 20, 2019
Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture presents an examination of ecoprecarity - the precarious lives that humans lead in the process and event of ecological disaster, and the increasing precarious state of the environment itself as a result of human interventions - in ...
By Todd Williams
May 08, 2019
Christina Rossetti’s Environmental Consciousness takes a cognitive ecocritical approach to Rossetti’s writing as it developed throughout her career. This study provides a unique understanding of Rossetti’s identity as an artist through a cognitive model while also engaging significantly with her ...
By Aaron Moe
February 11, 2019
Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form: Holding on to Proteus demonstrates how a fractal imagination helps one hold the form of a poem within the reaches of Deep Time, and it explores the kinship between the hazy, liminal moment when Sound becomes Syllable and the hazy, liminal moment when the sage ...
By Ben Holgate
February 12, 2019
Climate and Crises: Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse makes a dual intervention in both world literature and ecocriticism by examining magical realism as an international style of writing that has long-standing links with environmental literature. The book argues that, in the era of ...
By Wojciech Małecki, Piotr Sorokowski, Bogusław Pawłowski, Marcin Cieński
February 05, 2019
The power of stories to raise our concern for animals has been postulated throughout history by countless scholars, activists, and writers, including such greats as Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy. This is the first book to investigate that power and explain the psychological and cultural mechanisms ...
By Kyhl Lyndgaard
January 17, 2019
In his study of captivity narratives, Kyhl Lyndgaard argues that these accounts have influenced land-use policy and environmental attitudes at the same time that they reveal the complex relationship between ethnicity, landscape, and authorship. In connecting these themes, Lyndgaard offers readers ...
By Deena Rymhs
January 02, 2019
Roads, Mobility, and Violence in Indigenous Literature and Art from North America explores mobility, spatialized violence, and geographies of activism in a diverse archive of literary and visual art by Indigenous authors and artists. Building on Raymond Williams’s observation that "traffic is not ...
By Colin Carman
November 20, 2018
The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys: Eros and Environment is the first full-length study to explore a radically queer ecology at work in writings by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as their discussions of nature and the natural consistently link ecology and erotic practice. ...