Dancing with Disaster

Dancing with Disaster operates within what is, I believe, the most productive vein of contemporary environmental-theoretical thought and mines that vein significantly further in both theoretical and practical ways. It affiliates itself meaningfully with recent turns toward active matter, material feminist, and material ecocritical theory, and interprets a series of texts through a natural-cultural lens that not only yields a series of excellent close readings of diverse texts but also makes those readings innovative and instructive in a number of ways. --Frederick Buell, CUNY Queens, author of From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century Rigby provides a compelling portrait of our evolving relationship with our material environs. Lucid, thoughtful, and eloquently written, Dancing with Disaster will be of interest to scholars across the environmental humanities, cultural studies, and literature from Romanticism to the present day. --Journal of American Studies [S]howcase[s] the capaciousness of current environmental humanities practice and thegrowth of ecocriticism from its origins examining Anglo-American nature writing.... Rigby draws out the "material-discursive" nature of disaster through the structure of her book, the careful literary analyses she performs, and her insistence on interrogating how lexical shifts from "disaster" to "natural disaster" to "eco-catastrophe" (her preferredterm) structure human-nonhuman relations. --American LIterary History

Kate Rigby, author of Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Virginia), is Professor of Environmental Humanities at Monash University, Australia.