Ecocritical Aesthetics

Peter Quigley is professor of English at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa, and also Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs for the University of Hawai'i System. His publications include the edited volume Coyote in the Maze: Tracking Edward Abbey in a World of Words and Housing the Environmental Imagination: Politics, Beauty, and Refuge in American Nature Writing.Scott Slovic is professor of literature and environment, professor of natural resources and society, and Chair of the English Department at the University of Idaho. He is author and editor of many books and articles, including Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing and Going Away to Think.

"Beauty is perceived in and through cultural channels. However, because beauty is mediated does not by any means foreclose the idea that beauty is real and resides in the natural world. An ecologically inflected understanding of beauty and our perceptions and representations of it are essential to human flourishing."—Neil W. Browne, author of The World in Which We Occur"This important, even game-changing collection is motivated by the admirable impulse to reinsert beauty and aesthetics into the critical discourse of ecocriticism."—Christoph Irmscher, author of Louis Agassis: Creator of American Science

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction / Peter QuigleyI. The Relevance of Beauty1. "It is out of fashion to say so": The Language of Nature and the Rhetoric of Beauty in Robinson Jeffers / Tim Hunt2. Thoreau's Poetics of Nature / Arnold Berleant3. The Pout's Nest and the Painter's Eye / Frank Stewart4. "Yet How Beautiful It Is!": Work, Ethics, and Beauty in Stegner's Angle of Repose / Tyler Nickl5. Renaissance Aesthetics, Picturesque Beauty, the Natural Landscape: An Essay Examining the Rise and Fall of the Impulse toward Beauty / Mark LuccarelliII. Beauty and Engagement6. Toward an Ecofeminist Aesthetic of Reconnection / Greta Gaard7. Beauty and the Body: Towards an Ecofeminist Aesthetic that Includes Loving Our Naked Selves / Janine DeBaise8. Dystopia and Utopia in a Nuclear Landscape: Emerging Aesthetics in Satoyama / Yuki Masami9. Know Beauty, Know Justice: Why Beauty Matters in the Classroom / ShaunAnne TangneyIII. Materiality, Transcendence, and Aesthetics10. Nature's Colors: A Prismatic Materiality in the Natural/Cultural Realms / Serpil Oppermann11. From the Human to the Divine: Nature in the Writings of the Tamil Poet-Saints / Cynthia J. Miller12. Beauty as Ideological and Material Transcendence / Werner Bigell13. Toward Sustainable Aesthetics: The Poetry of Food, Sex, Water, Architecture, and Bicycle-Riding / Scott SlovicIndex