Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne And Nature

A friend and associate of the Transcendentalists in Concord, Nathaniel Hawthorne has rarely been taken seriously as a writer interested in the natural world. This book seeks to redress this omission by elucidating the sense of environmentality that emanates from Hawthorne’s romances and other writings. Hawthorne’s sense of kinship with the natural world runs deep in his work, particularly when his fiction is examined alongside his voluminous notebooks. Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature also contributes to the growing scholarly work aiming to illuminate Hawthorne as a writer deeply engaged in the issues of his day, particularly involving the environment, rather than an author simply interested in reinterpreting colonial history. Today’s readers stand to gain a rich new understanding of Hawthorne by reassessing Hawthorne’s attitude toward the natural world.

Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of America's most noted and highly praised writers, and a key figure in US literature. Although, he struggled to become an acknowledged author for most parts of his life, his work "stands in the limelight of the American literary consciousness" (Graham 5). For he is a direct descendant of Massachusetts Bay colonists in the Puritan era of the 17th and 18th century, New England served as a lifelong preoccupation for Hawthorne, and inspired many of his best-known stories. Hence, in order to understand the author and his work, it is crucial to apprehend the historical background from which his stories arose. The awareness of the Puritan legacy in Hawthorne's time, and their Calvinist beliefs which contributed to the establishment of American identity, serve as a basis for fathoming the intention behind Hawthorne's writings. His forefathers' concept of wilderness became an important part of their religious life, and in many of Hawthorne's tales, nature can be perceived as an active agent for the plot and the moral message. Therefore, it is indispensable to consider the development behind the Puritan perception, as well as the prevailing opinion on nature during the writer's lifetime. After the historical background has been depicted, the author himself is focused. His ambiguous character and non-persistent lifestyle are the source of many themes which can be retrieved from his works. Thus, understanding the man behind the stories is necessary in order to analyze the tales themselves. Seclusion, nature, and Puritanism are constantly recurring topics in the author's life and work. To become familiar with Hawthorne's relation to nature, his ancestors, and religion, it is essential to understand the vast amount of symbols his stories. His stories will be brought into focus, and will be analyzed on the basis of the historical and biographical facts, and further, his particular style and purpose will be taken into consideration.The second part of t

“Nature, thou art my goddess”—Edmund’s bold assertion in King Lear could easily inspire and, at the same time, function as a lamentation of the inadequate respect of nature in culture. In this volume, international experts provide multidisciplinary exploration of the insubordinate representations of nature in modern and contemporary literature and art. The work foregrounds the need to reassess how nature is already, and has been for a while, striking back against human domination. From the perspective of literary studies, art, history, media studies, ethics and philosophy, and ethnology and anthropology, Avenging Nature highlights the need of assessing insurgent discourses that—converging with counter-discourses of race, gender or class—realize the empowerment of nature from its subaltern position. Acknowledging the argument that cultural representations of nature establish a relationship of domination and exploitation of human discourse over nonhuman reality and that, in consequence, our regard for nature as humanist critics is instrumental and anthropocentric, the present volume advocates for the view that the time has come to finally perceive nature’s vengeance and to critically probe into nature’s ongoing revenge against the exploitation of culture.

Nature and Literary Studies supplies a broad and accessible overview of one of the most important and contested keywords in modern literary studies. Drawing together the work of leading scholars of a variety of critical approaches, historical periods, and cultural traditions, the book examines nature's philosophical, theological, and scientific origins in literature, as well as how literary representations of this concept evolved in response to colonialism, industrialization, and new forms of scientific knowledge. Surveying nature's diverse applications in twenty-first-century literary studies and critical theory, the volume seeks to reconcile nature's ideological baggage with its fundamental role in fostering appreciation of nonhuman being and agency. Including chapters on wilderness, pastoral, gender studies, critical race theory, and digital literature, the book is a key resource for students and professors seeking to understand nature's role in the environmental humanities.

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.

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

Turkish Ecocriticism: From Neolithic to Contemporary Timescapes explores the values, perceptions, and transformations of the environment, ecology, and nature in Turkish culture, literature, and the arts. Through these themes, it examines historical and contemporary environmentally engaged literary and cultural traditions in Turkey. The volume re-imagines Turkey in its geo-social and ecocultural narratives of multiple connections and complexities, in its multi-faceted webs of histories, and in its rich multispecies stories.

In literary and cinematic representations, deserts often betoken collapse and dystopia. Reading Aridity in Western American Literature offers readings of literature set in the American Southwest from ecocritical and new materialist perspectives. This book explores the diverse epistemologies, histories, relationships, futures, and possibilities that emerge from the representation of American deserts in fiction, film, and literary art, and traces the social, cultural, economic, and biotic narratives that foreground deserts, prompting us to reconsider new, provocative modes of human/nonhuman engagement in arid ecogeographies.