Kate Rigby - Böcker

Although the British romantic poets - notably, Blake, Wordsworth, and Byron - have been the subjects of previous ecocritical examinations, Kate Rigby's Topographies of the Sacred is the first book to compare English and German literary models of romanticism. Rigby treats not only canonical British romantics but an array of major figures in Continental literature, philosophy, and natural history, including Rousseau, Herder, Goethe, Schelling, Schiller, and Alexander von Humboldt. Following the pioneering work of Jonathan Bate and Karl Kroeber, she probes romantic understandings of nature, the source of the sacred, the power of place, and the role of literature, with a view to uncovering the tensions and ambivalences within the European romantic tradition. The result is a synthetic and philosophically inflected study that looks at the literary and ecological significance of place within a broad cultural context.

Although the British romantic poets - notably, Blake, Wordsworth, and Byron - have been the subjects of previous ecocritical examinations, Kate Rigby's Topographies of the Sacred is the first book to compare English and German literary models of romanticism. Rigby treats not only canonical British romantics but an array of major figures in Continental literature, philosophy, and natural history, including Rousseau, Herder, Goethe, Schelling, Schiller, and Alexander von Humboldt. Following the pioneering work of Jonathan Bate and Karl Kroeber, she probes romantic understandings of nature, the source of the sacred, the power of place, and the role of literature, with a view to uncovering the tensions and ambivalences within the European romantic tradition. The result is a synthetic and philosophically inflected study that looks at the literary and ecological significance of place within a broad cultural context.

One of the more frequently lodged, serious, and justifiable complaints about ecocritical work is that it is insufficiently theorised. Ecocritical Theory puts such claims decisively to rest by offering readers a comprehensive collection of sophisticated but accessible essays that productively investigate the relationship between European theory and ecocritique. With its international roster of contributors and subjects, it also militates against the parochialism of ecocritics who work within the limited canon of the American West. Bringing together approaches and orientations based on the work of European philosophers and cultural theorists, this volume is designed to open new pathways for ecocritical theory and practice in the twenty-first century.

The calamitous impacts of climate change that are beginning to be felt around the world today expose the inextricability of human and natural histories. Arguing for a more complex account of such calamities, Kate Rigby examines a variety of past disasters, from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to the mega-hurricanes of the twenty-first century, revealing the dynamic interaction of diverse human and nonhuman factors in their causation, unfolding, and aftermath.Focusing on the link between the ways disasters are framed by the stories told about them and how people tend to respond to them in practice, Rigby also shows how works of narrative fiction invite ethical reflection on human relations with one another, with our often unruly earthly environs, and with other species in the face of eco-catastrophe. In its investigation of an array of authors from the Romantic period to the present—including Heinrich von Kleist, Mary Shelley, Theodor Storm, Colin Thiele, and Alexis Wright— Dancing with Disaster demonstrates the importance of the environmental humanities in the development of more creative, compassionate, ecologically oriented, and socially just responses to the perils and possibilities of the Anthropocene.

This timely collection of essays by leading international scholars across religious studies and the environmental humanities advances a lively discussion on materialism in its many forms. While there is little agreement on what ‘materialism’ means, it is evident that there is a resurgence in thinking about matter in more animated and active ways.The volume explores how debates concerning the new materialisms impinge on religious traditions and the extent to which religions, with their material culture and beliefs in the Divine within the material, can make a creative contribution to debates about ecological materialisms. Spanning a broad range of themes, including politics, architecture, hermeneutics, literature and religion, the book brings together a series of discussions on materialism in the context of diverse methodologies and approaches. The volume investigates a range of issues including space and place, hierarchy and relationality, the relationship between nature and society, human and other agencies, and worldviews and cultural values.Drawing on literary and critical theory, and queer, philosophical, theological and social theoretical approaches, this ground-breaking book will make an important contribution to the environmental humanities. It will be a key read for postgraduate students, researchers and scholars in religious studies, cultural anthropology, literary studies, philosophy and environmental studies.

This timely collection of essays by leading international scholars across religious studies and the environmental humanities advances a lively discussion on materialism in its many forms. While there is little agreement on what ‘materialism’ means, it is evident that there is a resurgence in thinking about matter in more animated and active ways.The volume explores how debates concerning the new materialisms impinge on religious traditions and the extent to which religions, with their material culture and beliefs in the Divine within the material, can make a creative contribution to debates about ecological materialisms. Spanning a broad range of themes, including politics, architecture, hermeneutics, literature and religion, the book brings together a series of discussions on materialism in the context of diverse methodologies and approaches. The volume investigates a range of issues including space and place, hierarchy and relationality, the relationship between nature and society, human and other agencies, and worldviews and cultural values.Drawing on literary and critical theory, and queer, philosophical, theological and social theoretical approaches, this ground-breaking book will make an important contribution to the environmental humanities. It will be a key read for postgraduate students, researchers and scholars in religious studies, cultural anthropology, literary studies, philosophy and environmental studies.

The earliest environmental criticism took its inspiration from the Romantic poets and their immersion in the natural world. Today the “romanticising” of nature has come to be viewed with suspicion. This open access book, written by one of the leading ecocritics writing today, rediscovers the importance of the European Romantic tradition to the ways that writers and critics engage with the environment in the Anthropocene era. Exploring the work of such poets as Wordsworth, Shelley and Clare, the book discovers a rich vein of Romantic ecomaterialism and brings these canonical poets into dialogue with contemporary American and Australian poets and artists. Kate Rigby demonstrates the ways in which Romantic ecopoetics responds to postcolonial challenges and environmental peril to offer a collaborative artistic practice for an era of human-non-human cohabitation and kinship.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollection.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

Featuring contributions from key names in the field alongside some of the most exciting new voices, this collection presents cutting-edge work on species extinction from a wide variety of perspectives across the environmental humanities.Biodiversity loss threatens to transform the ecological foundations of all biological life on the planet, yet solutions to this crisis are fiercely contested. This book addresses extinction – along with climate change, the most urgent environmental crisis of the twenty-first century - by exploring species decline and conservation with a particular emphasis on divergent cultural framings, temporal scales, and media.Contributors explore what ethical guidelines underlie acceptable and unacceptable ways of interacting with plants and animals, what social, aesthetic, and affective perceptions and meanings are attributed to particular species, how human-nonhuman relations are construed as part of a particular social order and which species are considered worth conserving, and at what cost.Drawing on the disciplines of anthropology, cultural geography, environmental history, philosophy, literary studies, media studies, and studies of religion, this book explores how the engagement with biodiversity loss challenges basic assumptions in these disciplines and opens up new avenues of thought and activism for shaping the multispecies communities of the future.

Featuring contributions from key names in the field alongside some of the most exciting new voices, this collection presents cutting-edge work on species extinction from a wide variety of perspectives across the environmental humanities.Biodiversity loss threatens to transform the ecological foundations of all biological life on the planet, yet solutions to this crisis are fiercely contested. This book addresses extinction – along with climate change, the most urgent environmental crisis of the twenty-first century - by exploring species decline and conservation with a particular emphasis on divergent cultural framings, temporal scales, and media.Contributors explore what ethical guidelines underlie acceptable and unacceptable ways of interacting with plants and animals, what social, aesthetic, and affective perceptions and meanings are attributed to particular species, how human-nonhuman relations are construed as part of a particular social order and which species are considered worth conserving, and at what cost.Drawing on the disciplines of anthropology, cultural geography, environmental history, philosophy, literary studies, media studies, and studies of religion, this book explores how the engagement with biodiversity loss challenges basic assumptions in these disciplines and opens up new avenues of thought and activism for shaping the multispecies communities of the future.