Literary Ecologies – serie

American ecopoetries of migration explore the conflicted relationships of mobile subjects to the nonhuman world and thus offer valuable environmental insight for our current age of mass mobility and global ecological crisis. In Ecopoetic Place-Making, Judith Rauscher analyzes the works of five contemporary American poets of migration, drawing from ecocriticism and mobility studies. The poets discussed in her study challenge exclusionary notions of place-attachment and engage in ecopoetic place-making from different perspectives of mobility, testifying to the potential of poetry as a means of conceptualizing alternative environmental imaginaries for our contemporary world on the move.

In the Romantic period, women writers developed specific aesthetics and writing strategies in their engagements with climate change and climate catastrophe. Anya Heise-von der Lippe draws on intersectional feminist and ecocritical approaches to highlight gender as a complicating category in Romantic engagements with these topics. She addresses the ways in which gendered critical framings continue to resonate in current Anthropocene discourses that use Romantic conceptualizations of »Nature«, impacting contemporary approaches to the relationship between humans and non-humans in the ongoing climate catastrophe.

Water is our most precious resource and an element of culture historically charged with diverse meanings and values. Through the symbolic realms of literature, film, and visual arts, the contributors to this volume explore how the humanities can contribute to a critical understanding of human-water-power relationships and transform the debates on water dominated by natural sciences and techno-economical concerns. Examining the underrepresented cultural arenas in the socialist spaces of Eastern Europe, they focus on a variety of media and artistic practices. The late socialist era manifests as formative for the environmental discourses tied into local political and social contexts.

From pre-Columbian times till today, human interventions in aquatic environments have been shaping the geopolitics of Latin America – the technologies related to irrigation, the use of rivers as borders or transportation routes, as well as the management of drinking water. The contributors to this volume examine the relationship between water and politics in Latin America via readings of both renowned and upcoming writers. They focus on the web of power relations and practices generated by these interventions in Latin American fiction and poetry. They reveal literary strategies that make it possible to share knowledge about other ways of organizing life in aquatic environments.