Bücher der Reihe Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment

In this book, a case study of a humanistic reading of an essential evolutionary theorist, George C. Williams (May 12, 1926-September 8, 2010), the author contends that certain classic works of evolutionary theory and history are the most important nature writing of recent times. What it means to be scientifically literate-is essential for humanistic scholars, who must ground themselves with literary reading of scientific texts. As the most influential American evolutionary theorist of the second half of the twentieth century, Williams masters critique, frames questions about adaptation and natural selection, and answers in a plain, aphoristic writing style. Williams aims for parsimony-to "e;recognize adaptation at the level necessitated by the facts and no higher"e;-through a minimalist writing style. This voice articulates a powerful process that operates at very low levels by blind and selfish chance at the expense of its designed products, using purely trial and error. 

Visualizing Loss in Latin America engages with a varied corpus of textual, visual, and cultural material with specific intersections with the natural world, arguing that Latin American literary and cultural production goes beyond ecocriticism as a theoretical framework of analysis. Gisela Heffes poses the following crucial question: How do we construct a conceptual theoretical apparatus to address issues of value, meaning, tradition, perspective, and language, that contributes substantially to environmental thinking, and that is part and parcel of Latin America? The book draws attention to ecological inequality and establishes a biopolitical, ethics-based reading of Latin American art, film, and literature that operates at the intersection of the built environment and urban settings. Heffes suggests that the aesthetic praxis that emerges in/from Latin America is permeated with a rhetoric of waste¿a significant trait thatoverwhelmingly defines it.

Situated at the interaction of literary studies, environmental studies, and science studies, Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain tells the story of how writers heralded, and wrestled with, Britain's role in sparking the now-familiar "epoch of humans."

Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature: Gold Mountains, Weedflowers, and Murky Globes offers an ecocritical reinterpretation of Asian American literature.

This open access book suggests new ways of reading nineteenth-century African American literature environmentally. Combining insights from ecocriticism, African American studies, and Foucauldian theory, Matthias Klestil examines forms of environmental knowledge in African American writing ranging from antebellum slave narratives and pamphlets to Charlotte Forten¿s journals, Booker T. Washington¿s autobiographies, and Charles W. Chesnutt¿s short fiction. The volume highlights how literary forms of environmental knowledge in the African American tradition were shaped by the histories of slavery and race, mainstream environmental writing traditions, and African American forms of expression and intertextuality. Turning to the Underground Railroad, debates over education and home-building, and the aesthetics of the pastoral and the georgic, Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature provides an original perspective on the African American ecoliterary tradition that uncovers new facets of canonical and understudied texts and offers new directions for ecocriticism and African American studies.

Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System marks a significant intervention into the field of literary food studies.

Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change: Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology asks two questions: How do we read (in) the Anthropocene?

The Literary Heritage of the Environmental Justice Movement showcases environmental literature from writers who fought for women's rights, native rights, workers' power, and the abolition of slavery during the Romantic Era.

Ranging across poetry, foodstuffs, movies, tropical islands, wonder cabinets, apes, abstract painting, penguins and more, Reading for Wonder offers an anatomy of wonder in transmedia poetics, then explores its ethical power and political risks from early modern times to the present day.

This book foregrounds entanglement as a guiding concept in Derrida's work and considers its implications and benefits for ecocritical thought. Ergin introduces the notion of "ecological text" to emphasize textuality as a form of entanglement that proves useful in thinking about ecological interdependence and uncertainty.

One of the first studies to explore the relationship between environmental criticism and British modernism, Green Modernism explores the cultural function of nature in the modernist novel between 1900 and 1930. This theoretically engaged, historically informed book brings new materialist insights to novels by Conrad, Ford, Lawrence, and Butts.

This book highlights the importance of the cultural sphere, and in particular literature, in response and discussion with the unprecedented phenomenon known as climate change.

The concept of 'wilderness' as a foundational idea for environmentalist thought has become the subject of vigorous debates. Myths of Wilderness in Contemporary Narratives offers a taxonomy of the forms that wilderness writing has taken in Australian and Canadian literature, re-emphasizing both country's origins as colonies.

This study contributes to ongoing discussions on the connections between the environmental imaginary and issues of identity, place and nation. Utilizing a delimited ecocritical approach, McNee puts Brazilian culture, through the work of contemporary poets and visual artists, into a broader, transnational dialogue.

This book offers the term 'ecophobia' as a way of understanding and organizing representations of contempt for the natural world. Estok argues that this vocabulary is both necessary to the developing area of ecocritical studies and for our understandings of the representations of 'Nature' in Shakespeare.

This book tracks across history and cultures the ways in which writers have imagined cyclones, hurricanes, and typhoons, collectively understood as "tropical weather." Historically, literature has drawn upon the natural world for its store of symbolic language and technical device, making use of violent storms in the form of plot, drama, trope, and image in order to highlight their relationship to the political, social, and psychological realms of human affairs. Charting this relationship through writers such as Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Gisèle Pineau, and other writers from places like Australia, Japan, Mauritius, the Caribbean, and the Philippines, this ground-breaking collection of essays illuminates the specificities of the ways local, national, and regional communities have made sense and even relied upon the literary to endure the devastation caused by deadly tropical weather.

Challenges the notion of how early modern women may or may not have spoken for (or even with) nature. By focusing on various forms of 'dialogue,' these essays shift our interest away from speaking and toward listening, to illuminate ways that early modern Englishwomen interacted with their natural surroundings.

This book tracks across history and cultures the ways in which writers have imagined cyclones, hurricanes, and typhoons, collectively understood as ¿tropical weather.¿ Historically, literature has drawn upon the natural world for its store of symbolic language and technical device, making use of violent storms in the form of plot, drama, trope, and image in order to highlight their relationship to the political, social, and psychological realms of human affairs. Charting this relationship through writers such as Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Gis¿ Pineau, and other writers from places like Australia, Japan, Mauritius, the Caribbean, and the Philippines, this ground-breaking collection of essays illuminates the specificities of the ways local, national, and regional communities have made sense and even relied upon the literary to endure the devastation caused by deadly tropical weather.

East Asian Ecocriticisms presents original essays from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China that define and characterize trends in East Asian ecocriticism. Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives in environmental thought and scholarship, this volume presents valuable and original contributions to global conversations.

This book offers essays on both canonical and non-canonical German-language texts and films, advancing ecocritical models for German Studies, and introducing environmental issues in German literature and film to a broader audience.

This book traces the aesthetic of wonder from the romantic period through contemporary philosophy and literature, arguing for its relevance to ecological consciousness. As a result, contemporary scholarship has conflated wonder and the sublime and ultimately lost the nuances that these two concepts conjure for readers and thinkers.