Nature, Culture and Literature – serie

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-à-vis primitive peoples and primitive natures; for others it resulted in a shake-up of their belief in the superiority of European civilization in the face of the achievements of other civilizations, or in the face of spectacular nature scenes that outperformed the temperate European landscapes in terms of scale, sublimity, and grandeur. The documents that contain these stories of discovery left an important impression not only on German culture, but on European civilization at large, defining it vis-à-vis other civilizations and other natures. Europe today is the product of these encounters, including the way we conceive of our Umwelt, the environment that surrounds us. The story told in this book is the story of the rise of the modern German environmental imagination with particular emphasis on its narrative and visual components, complementing and expanding Barbara Stafford’s important work in her seminal study of the illustrated travel account from 1984. Chapters on Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, Albert Bierstadt, Leni Riefenstahl, and Werner Herzog unfold the key stages in a process that constitutes the unfolding of the modern German environmental imagination.

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 creative resistance to utilitarian imaginations, these essays insist on fluidities of meaning, ambiguities that derive both from water’s physical mutability and from its dual nature as life necessity and agent of destruction.

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 humanities.Contributors are: Darrell Arnold, Roman Bartosch, Aengus Daly, Gearoid Denvir, Elisabeth Jütten, Karla McManus, Sabine Lenore Müller, Maureen O’ Connor, Lillis Ó Laoire, Helen Phelan, Tina-Karen Pusse, and Christian Schmitt-Kilb.

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 transnational, the focus on Canada in the last section allows a more specific exploration of how themes, genres and literary forms develop their own manifestations within a national context. Through its unifying ecocultural focus and its variegated approaches, the volume is an essential contribution to contemporary environmental humanities.

Equine Medicine and Popular Romance in Late Medieval England explores a seldom-studied trove of English veterinary manuals, illuminating how the daily care of horses they describe reshapes our understanding of equine representation in the popular romance of late medieval England. A saint removes a horse’s leg the more easily to shoe him; a wild horse transforms spur wounds into the self-healing practice of bleeding; a messenger calculates time through his horse’s body. Such are the rich and conflicted visions of horse/human connection in the period. Exploring this imagined relation, Francine McGregor reveals a cultural undercurrent in which medieval England is so reliant on equine bodies that human anxieties, desires, and very orientation in daily life are often figured through them. This book illuminates the complex and contradictory yearnings shaping medieval perceptions of the horse, the self, and the identities born of their affinity.

Imaginative Ecologies: Inspiring Change through the Humanities highlights the role literature and visual arts play in fostering sustainability. It weaves together contributions by international scholars, practitioners and environmental activists whose insights are brought together to illustrate how creative imaginations can inspire change. One of the most outstanding characteristic of this volume is its interdisciplinarity and its varied methods of inquiry. The field of environmental humanities is discussed together with ideas such as the role of the public intellectual and el buen vivir. Examples of ecofiction from the UK, the US and Spain are analysed while artistic practices aimed at raising awareness of the effects of the Anthropocene are presented as imaginative ways of reacting against climate change and rampant capitalism.

Danish writer Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen (1885–1962) was a colonial plantation manager, big-game hunter, animal rights activist, nature conservationist, flower gardener, and much more. Most importantly, Dinesen wrote thought-provoking, mind-bending, boundary-shifting tales that can help us think constructively and creatively about many facets of life on our troubled planet. Isak Dinesen’s Ecological Power reexamines Dinesen in the context of 21st-century debates about time, animals, plants, gender, families, the idea of nature, and the very question of what it means to be human in a more-than-human world. We urgently need to power our societies and imaginations in new ways, and this book reconsiders Dinesen’s stories as an inexhaustible and so far largely untapped source of ecocultural energy.

Amidst the ongoing ecological crisis and other civilisational threats, this book adopts a tentatively optimistic and affirmative attitude to human-nature relations. The selection of early twentieth- and twenty-first century texts analysed by the contributors offers instances of the hopeful and restorative effects of human-nature encounters. Uniquely invoking the traditional concept of consolation, the authors demonstrate that the (re)turn to nature, which is typically a response to a personal or social challenge, takes different forms, ranging from nostalgia, escapism, anthropomorphic fantasies, transformative immersion in the wild coupled with environmental concerns, to personal testimonies, fictions about gardening, conservation, and environmental justice. From Conrad’s nostalgic yearning for the natural harmony inherent to sailing, the Kibbo Kift movement as a post-World War I programme of physical and moral regeneration, to contemporary celebration of a feminist hydrocommons and Black American farmers seeking justice through cultivating land, the chapters explore various attempts at overcoming the human-nature dualism, which, ultimately, inspires a cautiously hopeful outlook.

Why have so many women turned to animals in their writing—and what does that reveal about our shared world? Women Who Write Animals: Female Literary Representations of the More-Than-Human World brings to light the rich and often overlooked legacy of Anglophone women writers who, from the late eighteenth century to the present, have engaged powerfully and provocatively with animal life. From activists and scientists to poets and novelists, these authors have reshaped how we imagine animals—and, in turn, ourselves.Drawing on ecofeminism, animal studies, and posthumanist thought, the essays gathered here explore intimate interspecies bonds, political resistance, ethical entanglements, and alternative ways of knowing and inhabiting the world. Combining original archival research with innovative critical approaches, this collection reclaims women’s central role in rethinking nature and challenges readers to envision a more compassionate, relational, and interconnected planet.

This book, the first to consider Gerard Manley Hopkins as an ecological writer, explores the dimension that social ecology offers to an ecocriticism hitherto dominated by romantic nature writing. The case for a ‘green Hopkins’ is made through a paradigm of ‘Victorian Ecology’ that expands the scope of existing studies in Victorian literature and science. Parham argues that Hopkins developed a two-fold understanding of ecology – as a scientific philosophy constructed around ecosystems theory; and as a corresponding theory of society organised around the sustainable use of energy – as well as a corresponding poetic practice. In a radical new reading of the poems, he suggests that Hopkins translated an innovative nature poetry, in which rhythm conveyed a nature characterised by dialectical energy exchange, into a social ‘ecopoetry’ that embodied the environmental impact of Victorian ‘risk’ society on its human population.Located within a ‘Victorian ecological imagination’ that fused romanticism and pragmatism, the book views Hopkins’ work as indicating the value of reconciling a deep ecological assertion of the intrinsic value of (nonhuman) nature with social ecology’s more pragmatic attempts to critique and re-conceptualise human life.

By employing the modernist devices of fragmentation, recombination, and accentuated blank space, E. E. Cummings engages singularly with being on earth. This ecological achievement was largely ignored by the New Critics, and the subsequent semiotic spirit which has been holding that the sign hardly has to do with concrete existence on earth ironically perpetuated the neglect. In this book Etienne Terblanche shows that Cummings’s ecology relocates his oeuvre and status in contemporary discourse. For, the poet follows, mimes, and connects with the unfolding changes of earthly existence and growth—what he views as the ‘Tao’ of being—in his lyricism, sex poems, satire, and visual-verbal poems. This is true especially of the elusive manner or ‘how’ of his poetry overall. Careful ecocritical reading of this active culture-nature integrity in his poetry brings about an imperative new understanding and placement of his project. It further serves to show that, in their different ways, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound engage with nature in a similar way, thus again accentuating the importance of Cummings’s poetic project to the neglected and vital ecocritical perception of modernism in poetry.

This book addresses the role and potential of literature in the process of contesting and re-evaluating concepts of nature and animality, describing one’s individual environment as the starting point for such negotiations. It employs the notion of the ‘literary event’ to discuss the specific literary quality of verbal art conceptualised as EnvironMentality. EnvironMentality is grounded on the understanding that fiction does not explain or second scientific and philosophical notions but that it poses a fundamental challenge to any form of knowledge manifesting in processes determined by the human capacity to think beyond a given hermeneutic situation.Bartosch foregrounds the dialectics of understanding the other by means of literary interpretation in ecocritical readings of novels by Amitav Ghosh, Zakes Mda, Yann Martel, Margaret Atwood and J.M. Coetzee, arguing that EnvironMentality helps us as readers of fiction to learn from the books we read that which can only be learned by means of reading: to “think like a mountain” (Aldo Leopold) and to know “what it is like to be a bat” (Thomas Nagel).