Bücher der Reihe Ecocritical Theory and Practice

This is a collection of essays about the media, the environment, and the whole of humanity at the brink of extinction. As the demands of overpopulation and of an unsustainable consumer economy dry up existing natural resources and destroy vital ecosystems that we need to survive, the corporate-controlled media saturate worldwide audiences with a barrage of hypnotic images and narratives to stimulate over-consumption and to distract us from the consequences of rampant consumerism, while remaining silent about the systematic destruction of the environment and our future. Academicians from the across the sciences, the social sciences, the arts, and the humanities engage in an interdisciplinary discussion informed by a vision of an interconnected humanity and focused on the role of the media in forging public discourse. Contributors to the collection argue that todayΓÇÖs media are failing humanity. Rather than providing pictures of reality on which the worldΓÇÖs citizens can act, the corporate-controlled media are widely used as instruments of commercial and political propaganda, creating an immense web of images and narratives that their creators know to be not trueΓÇô-fabrications designed to sell, to manipulate, in a sense to enslave worldwide audiences. At the core of the discussion in this book is a utopian vision of one unified humanityΓÇöbillions of people whose destinies and dreams are imbricated and interdependent, and who share the same world, the same habitats. It is a vision of a world that cherishes diversity but is also unitedΓÇöa world where our differences are no longer a cause for conflict and where separate countries or separate ethnic or religious communities no longer have to compete or wage war to exploit available resources. As extensions of humans, the media can be instruments of salvation instead of destruction, liberation instead of oppression. But first, we must recognize the challenges we face.

Following Franoise d'Eaubonne's creation of the term ';ecofeminism' in 1974, scholars around the world have explored ways that the degradation of the environment and the subjugation of women are linked. In the nearly three decades since the publication of the classical work Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva in 1993, several collections have appeared that apply ecofeminism to literary criticism, also known as feminist ecocriticism. The most recent of these include anthologies that emphasize international perspectives, furthering the comparative task launched by Mies and Shiva. To date, however, there have been no books devoted to gaining a broad-based understanding of feminist ecocriticism in India, understood in its own terms. Our new volume Indian Feminist Ecocriticism offers a survey of literature as seen through an ecofeminist lens by Indian scholars, which places contemporary literary analysis through a sampling of its diverse languages and in the context of millennia-old mythic traditions of India.

The book offers a close examination of the rhetoric and discourses around the Bhopal disaster through a reading of numerous cultural texts-from fiction to protest effigies and posters - and maps the production of an ecological Gothic around the disaster.

The book provides ecocultural perspectives on ethics from a variety of cultural contexts. It argues that any ecological perspectives/issues/conditions cannot be separated from their cultural contexts and thus, we need to employ a culture-specific scrutiny to understand the ethics of ecoculture.

This book is an international collection of ecocritical essays that examine sustainability in relation to Romantic-era Britain. It examines Romantic works while interrogating issues of race, gender, religion, and identity, beginning with inspiration and creativity and ending with considerations about extinction and apocalypse.

This book uncovers the rich variety of environmental writing across the genres in nineteenth-century American literature. The essays in this collection offer a representative sampling of the nineteenth century's evolving exploration of the interplay between humans and the natural environment.

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 humanityΓÇÖs 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 ΓÇ£natureΓÇ¥ and humanityΓÇÖs 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.

New International Voices in Ecocriticism presents a compendium of ecocritical approaches, including ecocritical theory, ecopoetics, ecocritical analyses of literary, cultural, and musical texts, and new critical vistas on human-nonhuman relations, postcolonial subjects, material selves, gender, and queer ecologies.

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.

This book approaches portrayals of environmental crises in Latin American nations in literature, film, performance, and digital art within the context of the ongoing expansion of globalized neoliberal capitalism from and ecocritical perspective.

By recognizing the groundbreaking work of many non-Italian ecocritics, and linking to the homegrown contributions of Serenella Iovino, Marco Armerio, and Giovanna Ricoveri, the authors of Ecocritical Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature: The Denatured Wild, challenge the narrowly defined conventions of Italian Studies and illuminate the complexities of an Italian ecocriticism that reveals a rich environmentally engaged literary and cultural tradition.

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.

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 Sustainability is a collection of sixteen essays that examine the British Romantic era in ecocritical terms. Written by scholars from five continents, this international collection addresses the works of traditional Romantic writers such as John Keats, Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Samuel Coleridge but also delves into ecocritical topics related to authors added to the canon more recently, such as Elizabeth Inchbald and John Clare. The essays examine geological formations, clouds, and landscapes as well as the posthuman and the monstrous. The essays are grouped into rough categories that start with inspiration and the imagination before moving to the varied types of consumption associated with human interaction with the natural world. Subsequent essays in the volume focus on environmental destruction, monstrous creations, and apocalypse. The common theme is sustainability, as each contributor examines Romantic ideas that intersect with ecocriticism and relates literary works to questions about race, gender, religion, and identity.

Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development extends the energetic and socially important tradition of postcolonial ecocriticism to regions of the world not normally considered in the postcolonial context, such as southern Japan and eastern Europe. The text expands Karen Thornber's notion of "ecoambiguity" from her own work on East Asian literature and culture to many other countries.

A chief innovation of Explorations in Ecocriticism is to push ecological criticism beyond its focus on literary studies to engage with other arts and culture. One chapter closely examines the pictures commissioned by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to valorize its big dam projects. Previously, no one has written about the large art collection that toured the nation under the auspices of the Smithsonian in the early 1970s, when the Bureau of Reclamation was under fire and new environmental regulations were becoming law. Another chapter, ';An Iconography of Sabotage,' previously published in France as part of a Paris symposium, looks at the pictorial dimension of saboteurs throughout American history, with a special emphasis on the IWW and Earth First! The book draws extensively on the social sciences. Ecology and environment are treated too often as technical topics that go over the heads of lay readers. Many Americans care about air and water quality, the extinction of species, and the unfortunate politicization of science. But they also find the discourse daunting, the details exceedingly complex. By leavening such heavy subjects with current events, Explorations in Ecocriticism makes environmental issues accessible to lay readers and offers routes to sustainability in the United States today.

Feminist Ecocriticism examines the interplay of women and nature as seen through literary theory and criticism, drawing on insights from such diverse fields as chaos theory and psychoanalysis, while examining genres ranging from nineteenth-century sentimental literature to contemporary science fiction. The book explores the central claim of ecofeminism-that there is a connection between environmental degradation and the subordination of women-with the goal of identifying and fostering liberatory alternatives.

This book offers a timely exploration of the rapidly growing field of ecocriticism and gives prominence to the writers, creators, theorists, traditions, concerns, and landscapes of Southeast Asia. The contributors emphasize the transnational flows between Southeast Asian countries and Australia, England, Taiwan (Formosa), and the United States.

By pursuing an ecocritical reading, The Forest in Medieval German Literature examines passages in medieval German texts where protagonists operated in the forest and found themselves either in conflictual situations or in refuge. By probing the way the individual authors dealt with the forest, illustrating how their characters fared in this sylvan space, the role of the forest proved to be of supreme importance in understanding the fundamental relationship between humans and nature. The medieval forest almost always introduced an epistemological challenge: how to cope in life, or how to find one's way in this natural maze. By approaching these narratives through modern ecocritical issues that are paired with premodern perspectives, we gain a solid and far-reaching understanding of how medieval concepts can aid in a better understanding of human society and nature in its historical context. This book revisits some of the best and lesser known examples of medieval German literature, and the critical approach used here will allow us to recognize the importance of medieval literature for a profound reassessment of our modern existence with respect to our own forests.

This book affirms its feminist and activist roots, resists gender essentialisms, and companions the activist orientations of critical animal studies and environmental justice. It draws on feminist science and anticolonial studies, utilizing a posthumanist, queer feminist methodology to enhance discussions of today's ecopolitical challenges.

Using the rubric of the "Global South," this volume allows scholars from underrepresented regions to offer commentary on the ecological conditions and environmental cultures in the developing world.