Thinking about and relating to the environment - what the Germans call Umwelt, i.e., the world that surrounds us - in the way that we do today has a long tradition within modern German culture. German scientists were among the many European explorers that left Europe in the late eighteenth century on voyages of discovery to then unknown parts of the world. For some explorers, discovery meant the fundamental confirmation of their own superiority vis-a-vis primitive peoples and primitive natures; for others it resulted in a shake-up of their belief in the superiority of European...

Water in Social Imagination considers how human communities have known, imagined and shaped water and how water has shaped both material culture and the imagination. Essays from diverse perspectives offer histories of water at different scales from community water wells and sacred springs to Siberian rivers and the regulated space of the Baltic Sea. From early modernization through Soviet style technological optimism to contemporary environmentalism, water s ideological uses are multiple. With sustained attention not just to state policy and the technologies of high modernity, but to...

From Ego to Eco – Mapping Shifts from Anthropocentrism to Ecocentrism investigates philosophical, political and aesthetic formations of ecocentrism. Representing a variety of disciplines and testing a broad scope of critical approaches, the contributors of this volume argue that anthropocentrism is not - as often claimed - a predominant world view but, rather, a widely contested concept. Within various historical and national contexts, the individual contributors of this book discuss the significance and relevance of ecocentrism and offer new avenues to emerging discourses in the...

The Nature Essay: Ecocritical Explorations is the first extended study of a powerful literary form born out of the traditions of Enlightenment and Romanticism. It traces the varied stylistic paradigms of the ‘nature essay’ down to the present day. Reading essays as platforms for ecological discourse, the book analyses canonical and marginalised texts, mainly from German, English and American literature. Simone Schröder argues that the essay’s environmental impact is rooted in its negotiation of scientific, poetic, spiritual, and ethical modes of perceiving nature. Together, the...

Green Matters offers a fascinating insight into the regenerative function of literature with regard to environmental concerns. Based on recent developments in ecocriticism, the book demonstrates how the aesthetic dimension of literary texts makes them a vital force in the struggle for sustainable futures. Applying this understanding to individual works from a number of different thematic fields, cultural contexts and literary genres, Green Matters presents novel approaches to the manifold ways in which literature can make a difference. While the first sections of the book highlight the...

Modern Ecopoetry: Reading the Palimpsest of the More-Than-Human World interrogates how humans’ relation to and confrontation with the nonhuman world is captured in or through poetry. It brings together contributions that explore how modern poetry addresses human beings’ relationship with the natural world, mirroring some of the most salient ecopoetic approaches to date. This collection is written from very different corners of the globe and significantly adds to the existing body of work because, on the one hand, it continues to focus on the greening of poetry and, on the other, it...