New International Voices in Ecocriticism

Serpil Oppermann is professor of English at Hacettepe University.

With essays from 12 doctoral students, this volume showcases emergent voices and celebrates the current diversity of critical approaches in ecocriticism. Most of the essays examine environmental issues within traditional literary genres, but a few analyze forms of pop culture, such as television sitcoms and heavy metal music. In a useful introduction, Oppermann offers a survey of the global contexts of ecocriticism. The essays themselves appear in three sections. The first, 'New Ecocritical Trends,' proposes a set of theoretical approaches: deconstructive ecocriticism, 'postlocal ecocriticism,' 'affective ecocriticism,' and 'gothic ecocriticism.' The second section explores how ecocriticism has moved beyond a concern with nature: these essays discuss the relationships among environment, culture, identity, and power and examine concepts of the 'un-natural' and the marginalized, place, and displacement. The final section focuses on human and animal relations in contemporary literature. The volume features an impressively transnational group of young scholars . . . The collection offers an interesting set of provocations and offers a glimpse of how ecocriticism might evolve as an increasingly global field of study. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.

• Table of ContentsForewordby Scott SlovicAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: New International Voices in EcocriticismSerpil OppermannPart I. New Ecocritical TrendsChapter 1. Selves at the Fringes: Expanding Material Ecocriticism Kyle BladowChapter 2. “Global Subcultural Bohemianism”: Postlocal Ecocriticism and Tim Winton’s BreathWilliam V. LombardiChapter 3. “What is it about you . . . that so irritates me?”: Northern Exposure’s Sustainable FeelingSylvan GoldbergChapter 4. Bang Your Head and Save the Planet: Gothic EcocriticismBasak Agin DönmezPart II. Nature and Human ExperienceChapter 5. Un-Natural Ecopoetics: Natural/Cultural Intersections in Poetic Language and FormSarah NolanChapter 6. “There’s No Place like ‘Home’”: Susanna Moodie, Shelter Writing, and Dwelling on the EarthElise MitchellChapter 7. Against Ecological Kitsch: Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage ProjectGuangchen ChenChapter 8. Neo-Aranyakas: An Enquiry into Mahasweta Devi’s Forest FictionsAnu T. AsokanChapter 9. Ecoerotic Imaginations in the Early Modernity and Cavendish’s The Convent of PleasureAbdulhamit ArvasPart III. Human-Nonhuman RelationsChapter 10. What Are We? The Human Animal in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy ApeChristina CaupertChapter 11. Familiar Animals: The question of human-animal relationships in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo CityElzette SteenkampChapter 12. Dismantling “Conceptual Straitjackets” in Peter Dickinson’s EvaDiana Villanueva RomeroAfterword by Greta GaardContributorsIndex