Culture – Environment – Society – serie

Inspired by Lynn Keller’s notion of “the self-conscious Anthropocene,” the book sets out to consider poetry as a privileged space for rethinking our basic epistemological assumptions. Poetry does not have the kind of agency a direct political intervention has; in fact, as W. H. Auden famously put it, “poetry makes nothing happen.” On the other hand, poetry is crucial when it comes to awakening our individual and collective imagination. Considering the statement by Lawrence Buell that the current ecological crisis is, in the first place, a crisis of the imagination, this function of poetry comes through as particularly important.

The book scrutinizes post-war rat control programs in Poland, exploring their intricate intersections with politics, science, and ideology. It delves into the impact of prevailing cultural narratives concerning problematic urban rodents on pest control and sanitary programs, as well as the ways in which biological factors shape, challenge, or impede political modernization initiatives. Employing urban rat populations as an unequivocal exemplar of an undesirable element, the author constructs an inquiry into the strategies of political exclusion. The analysis of rat extermination schemes facilitates an exploration of the patterns of social progress within a semi-peripheral country and the discursive shifts evident in political language regarding the troublesome non-human urban residents.

The book explores the multi-faceted nature of contemporary reflections on agency, focusing on various discursive practices that shape the posthumanist approach to the relationship between the human and non-human world from a planetary perspective. The chapters delve into critical human-animal studies, examine new non-anthropocentric identity constructs, and offer analyses that reinterpret meanings through semiotic inversions and challenge static cultural patterns. The book concludes with discussions on decolonization practices that aim to liberate agency from oppressive systems, particularly those dominated by imperial phallogocentrism.

This volume offers an eco-critical and post-humanist deconstruction of ecologies, environmentalisms, trans- and post-humanisms represented in the 21st century vampire narratives. The corpus encompasses the so-called Western narratives (anglo- and francophone), as well as the Eastern European ones (Polish and Russian). The structural analysis of the vampire narratives focuses on the main topoi: the ecological attitudes and statements as expressed by the actors of the stories themselves; the narratives’ attitude towards the animals; the vampire and human actors’ diet(s); the actors’ and the narrative definition and positioning of the nonhuman. The volume follows the topoi’s complex entanglements presenting a multidimensional insight into the contemporary stances on the world-realities.

In an era of climate emergency and political upheaval, heritage demands radical rethinking. This volume confronts the Enlightenment-rooted dualisms that fragment heritage into opposing categories. By embracing posthumanist concepts like naturecultures and agency, this volume explores entangled human and nonhuman pasts, from the contested Białowieża Forest to ancient sensory environments. Through case studies spanning archaeology, museum studies, and literary analysis, contributors unravel heritage as a dynamic, more-than-human meshwork. This collection is an urgent call to transcend reductive binaries, fostering an ethical, responsive, and sustainable heritage practice attuned to our shared, precarious futures.

This volume explores the deep connections between literature and botany, examining how plants shape cultural narratives, ecological thought, and human imagination. From ancient myths to contemporary ecocriticism, the collected essays analyze plant symbolism, botanical knowledge, and vegetal agency in literary and artistic traditions. Engaging with perspectives from environmental humanities, posthumanism, and cultural studies, the book highlights the role of plants in shaping human history and ecological awareness. By bridging science and the humanities, it offers a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on human-plant relationships in literature and beyond.

This volume highlights recent research on women’s authorship in the Afro-Luso-Brazilian Atlantic, intersecting memory studies, postcolonialism, and world literature. It explores how women’s literary and critical works act as cultural resistance, challenging hegemonic male narratives. Using a comparative approach, it examines canonical and non-canonical writers, including those using social media and slam poetry. Themes include gender, race, violence, and exclusion, analyzed intersectionally. Essays discuss how women’s writing deconstructs memory legacies and challenges patriarchy, neoliberalism, and Western hegemony. Methodology includes comparative analysis and fieldwork across Lusophone countries, featuring interviews and local events.

This volume offers the first comprehensive analysis of Yoko Tawada’s German-language works and selected translations from Japanese, approached through the perspective of studies on difference. Drawing on interdisciplinary methodologies, including poststructuralism and posthumanism, it explores the dynamics of alterity – nomadic narratives, water, transformation, transgression and migration – as key motifs in Tawada’s novels, essays, poetry, and plays. The dynamics of alterity permeate binary entanglements of the external and internal worlds, they do not reproduce the clash of thesis and antithesis or affirm negativity. They offer a way to step outside the limitations of dichotomous logic.

The volume explores the manner in which literature and culture across various historical periods have responded to the sounds produced by more-than-human beings. The study examines both symbolic and literal representations of these voices, demonstrating how they shape human imagination and interspecies relations. The book is structured in three parts: the first analyses symbolic soundscapes; the second focuses on encounters and exchanges between species; and the third highlights ethical and technological efforts to protect endangered animals and to commemorate those already lost.