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 humanity's consumption of natural resources. Against this background, the decline of...

This edited collection explores the relationships between humans and nature at a time when the traditional sense of separation between human cultures and a natural wilderness is being eroded. The Anthropocene, whose literal translation is the Age of Man, is one way of marking these planetary changes to the Earth system. Global climate change and rising sea levels are two prominent examples of how nature can no longer be simply thought of as something outside and removed from humans (and vice versa). This collection applies the concepts of ecology and entanglement to address pressing...

Why do we find so many references to nature and the environment in the many Caribbean literary texts that try to come to terms with the contemporary age of globalization? Even when these novels and poems do not seem to be concerned with environmental issues at all, they abound with fragrant, creepy or dark references to flowers, insects, trees, gardens, and mud. This book discusses a range of Anglophone and Dutch-language Caribbean literary texts to propose an answer. It shows that some writers evoke nature to question oppressive notions of what is natural, and what is not, when it comes to...

The term "urban ecology" has become a buzzword in various disciplines, including the social and natural sciences as well as urban planning and architecture. The environmental humanities have been slow to adapt to current theoretical debates, often excluding human-built environments from their respective frameworks. This book closes this gap both in theory and in practice, bringing together "urban ecology" with ecocritical and cultural ecological approaches by conceptualizing the city as an integral part of the environment and as a space in which ecological problems manifest concretely....

The nineteenth-century roots of environmental writing in American literature are often mentioned in passing and sometimes studied piece by piece. Scribes of Nature: Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature brings together numerous explorations of environmentally-aware writing across the genres of nineteenth-century literature. Like Lawrence Buell, the authors of this collection find Thoreau's writing a touchstone of nineteenth-century environmental writing, particularly focusing on Thoreau's claim that humans may function as -scribes of nature.- However, these studies...

Australian feminist philosopher Val Plumwood coined the term -critical ecofeminism- to -situate humans in ecological terms and non-humans in ethical terms, - for -the two tasks are interconnected, and cannot be addressed properly in isolation from each other.- Variously using the terms -critical ecological feminism, - -critical anti-dualist ecological feminism, - and -critical ecofeminism, - Plumwood's work developed amid a range of perspectives describing feminist intersections with ecopolitical issues--i.e., toxic production and toxic wastes, indigenous sovereignty, global economic justice,...

Sustainability and the City: Urban Poetics and Politics contributes to third-generation discourse on sustainable development by considering, through a humanistic lens, theories and practices of sustainability in a wide range of urban cultures. It demonstrates cities' inextricability from discussions on sustainability because not only is the world urbanizing at an unprecedented rate but also cities are primary locations of the circulation of excess capital, socioeconomic divisions and hierarchies, political resistance, friction between human and non-human worlds, and the confluence of art,...

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 collection examines the relationship between humanitarian and environmental issues and how they portrayed in the media. The essays examine this question from a variety of academic viewpoints and argue that although the interests of planet and people are often seen in opposition, they are, in reality, symbiotic.

The volume offers a survey of the contribution of German literature and culture to the evolution of ecological thought. As the field of ecocritical theory and practice is rapidly expanding towards transnational and global dimensions, it seems nevertheless necessary to consider the distinct manifestations of ecological thought in various cultures. In this sense, the volume demonstrates in twenty-six essays from different disciplines how German literature, philosophy, art, and science have contributed in unique ways to the emergence of ecological thought on national and transnational scale. The...