Beyond Nature Writing Expanding The Boundaries Of Ecocriticism

Together, their work signals a new direction in the field and offers refreshingly original insights into a broad spectrum of texts.

Ecocriticism and environmental communication studies have for many years co-existed as parallel disciplines, occasionally crossing paths but typically operating in separate academic spheres. These fields are now rapidly converging, and this handbook aims to reinforce the common concerns and methodologies of the sibling disciplines. The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication charts the history of the relationship between ecocriticism and environmental communication studies, while also highlighting key new paradigms in information studies, diverse examples of practical applications of environmental communication and textual analysis, and the patterns and challenges of environmental communication in non-Western societies. Contributors to this book include literary, film and religious studies scholars, communication studies specialists, environmental historians, practicing journalists, art critics, linguists, ethnographers, sociologists, literary theorists, and others, but all focus their discussions on key issues in textual representations of human–nature relationships and on the challenges and possibilities of environmental communication. The handbook is designed to map existing trends in both ecocriticism and environmental communication and to predict future directions. This handbook will be an essential reference for teachers, students, and practitioners of environmental literature, film, journalism, communication, and rhetoric, and well as the broader meta-discipline of environmental humanities.

With twelve original essays that characterize truly international ecocriticisms, New International Voices in Ecocriticism presents a compendium of ecocritical approaches, including ecocritical theory, ecopoetics, ecocritical analyses of literary, cultural, and musical texts (especially those not commonly studied in mainstream ecocriticism), and new critical vistas on human-nonhuman relations, postcolonial subjects, material selves, gender, and queer ecologies. It develops new perspectives on literature, culture, and the environment. The essays, written by contributors from the United States, Canada, Germany, Turkey, Spain, China, India, and South Africa, cover novels, drama, autobiography, music, and poetry, mixing traditional and popular forms. Popular culture and the production and circulation of cultural imaginaries feature prominently in this volume—how people view their world and the manner in which they share their perspectives, including the way these perspectives challenge each other globally and locally. In this sense the book also probes borders, border transgression, and border permeability. By offering diverse ecocritical approaches, the essays affirm the significance and necessity of international perspectives in environmental humanities, and thus offer unique responses to environmental problems and that, in some sense, affect many beginning and established scholars.

Scholarship of literature and the environment demonstrates myriad understandings of nature and culture. While some work in the field results in approaches that belong in the realm of cultural studies, other scholars have expanded the boundaries of ecocriticism to connect the practice more explicitly to disciplines such as the biological sciences, human geography, or philosophy. Even so, the field of ecocriticism has yet to clearly articulate its interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary nature. In Toward a Literary Ecology: Places and Spaces in American Literature,editors Karen E. Waldron and Robert Friedman have assembled a collection of essays that study the interconnections between literature and the environment to theorize literary ecology. The disciplinary perspectives in these essays allow readers to comprehend places and environments and to represent, express, or strive for that comprehension through literature. Contributors to this volume explore the works of several authors, including Gary Snyder, Karen Tei Yamashita, Rachel Carson, Terry Tempest Williams, Chip Ward, and Mary Oliver. Other essays discuss such topics as urban fiction as a model of literary ecology, the geographies of belonging in the work of Native American poets, and the literary ecology of place in “new” nature writing. Investigating texts for the complex interconnections they represent, Toward a Literary Ecology suggests what such texts might teach us about the interconnections of our own world. This volume also offers a means of analyzing representations of people in places within the realm of an historical, cultural, and geographically bounded yet diverse American literature. Intended for students of literature and ecology, this collection will also appeal to scholars of geography, cultural studies, philosophy, biology, history, anthropology, and other related disciplines.

Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature: Gold Mountains, Weedflowers, and Murky Globes offers an ecocritical reinterpretation of Asian American literature. The book considers more than a century of Asian American writing, from Eaton’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) to Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013), through an ecocritical lens. The volume explores the most relevant landmarks in Asian American literature: the first-contact narratives written by Bulosan, Kingston, Mukherjee, and Jen; the controversial texts published by Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton) at the time of the Yellow Peril; the rise of cultural nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s, illustrated by Wong’s Homebase and Kingston’s China Men; old and recent examples of “internment literature” dealing with the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII (Sone, Houston, Miyake, Kadohata); and the new trends in Asian American literature since the 1990s, exemplified by Yamashita’s and Ozeki’s novels, which explore the challenges of our transnational, transnatural era. Begoña Simal-González’s ecocritical readings of these texts provide crucial interdisciplinary insights, addressing and analyzing important narratives within Asian American culture and literature.

Laurenz Volkmann is Professor of EFL Teaching at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, where NAncy Grimm and Katrin Thomson also teach. Ines Detmers is a lecturer in English literature at the Technical University of Chemnitz. --Book Jacket.

Victorian literature’s fascination with the past, its examination of social injustice, and its struggle to deal with the dichotomy between scientific discoveries and religious faith continue to fascinate scholars and contemporary readers. During the past hundred years, traditional formalist and humanist criticism has been augmented by new critical approaches, including feminism and gender studies, psychological criticism, cultural studies, and others. In Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature, twelve scholars offer new assessments of Victorian poetry, novels, and nonfiction. Their essays examine several major authors and works, and introduce discussions of many others that have received less scholarly attention in the past. General reviews of the current status of Victorian literature in the academic world are followed by essays on such writers as Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and the Brontë sisters. These are balanced by essays that focus on writing by women, the development of the social problem novel, and the continuity of Victorian writers with their Romantic forebears. Most importantly, the contributors to this volume approach Victorian literature from a decidedly contemporary scholarly angle and write for a wide audience of specialists and non-specialists alike. Their essays offer readers an idea of how critical commentary in recent years has influenced—and in some cases changed radically—our understanding of and approach to literary study in general and the Victorian period in particular. Hence, scholars, teachers, and students will find the volume a useful survey of contemporary commentary not just on Victorian literature, but also on the period as a whole.