Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism – Serie

Ecocriticism, a field of study that has expanded dramatically over the past decade, has nevertheless remained - until recently - closely focused on critical analyses of nature writing and literature of wilderness. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace push well beyond that established framework with this groundbreaking collection of essays by respected ecocritics and scholars from the literary and environmental arenas. Together, their work signals a new direction in the field and offers refreshingly original insights into a broad spectrum of texts.

Ecocriticism, a field of study that has expanded dramatically over the past decade, has nevertheless remained - until recently - closely focused on critical analyses of nature writing and literature of wilderness. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace push well beyond that established framework with this groundbreaking collection of essays by respected ecocritics and scholars from the literary and environmental arenas. Together, their work signals a new direction in the field and offers refreshingly original insights into a broad spectrum of texts.

An ecocritical exploration of the varied preconceptions that have shaped and coloured the human relationship with the early Virginia landscape. Drawing on familiar history and lesser-known material, it focuses on the changes to the land over time and changes in the way people viewed Virginia.

An ecocritical exploration of the varied preconceptions that have shaped and coloured the human relationship with the early Virginia landscape. Drawing on familiar history and lesser-known material, it focuses on the changes to the land over time and changes in the way people viewed Virginia.

This study brings together the genres of autobiography and environmental literature. It examines a form of grief narrative in which writers deal with mourning by standing outside the text in writing about the natural world, and inside it in making that exposition part of the grieving process.

This study brings together the genres of autobiography and environmental literature. It examines a form of grief narrative in which writers deal with mourning by standing outside the text in writing about the natural world, and inside it in making that exposition part of the grieving process.

In 1903 John Burroughs published an ""Atlantic Monthly"" article attacking popular nature writers as ""sham naturalists"". This debate resulted in a new standard of accuracy for the nature writer and reflected a new way of thinking about moral responsibilities to wildlife.

The work of John Charle Fremont, Richard Byrd, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, John Wesley Powell, Susan Cooper, Rachel Carson, and Loren Eiseley represents a widely divergent body of writing. Yet despite their range of genres - including exploration narratives, technical reports, natural histories, scientific autobiographies, fictional utopias, nature writing, and popular scientific literature - these seven authors produced strikingly connected representations of nature and the practice of science in America from about 1840 to 1970. Michael A. Bryson provides a thoughtful examination of the authors, their work and the ways in which science and nature unite them. This title explores how our environmental attitudes have been influenced and shaped by various scientific perspectives from the time of western expansion and geographic exploration in the mid-19th century to the start of the contemporary environmental movement in the 20th century. Bryson offers a literary-critical analysis of how writers of different backgrounds, scientific training and geographic experiences represented nature through various kinds of natural science, from natural history to cartography to resource management to ecology and evolution, and in the process, explored the possibilities and limits of science itself.

One of the most vexing problems facing American modernist poets was how to find a place for poetry and religion in a culture that considered science its most reliable source of truth. By the time Robert Frost began writing, the Emersonian concept of nature as an analogue for a benevolent deity had been replaced among the scientifically educated by the view that nature's mechanisms were based solely upon accident, competition and survival. Frost not only saw his religious belief shattered by Darwin's theory of natural selection but also recognized that poetry, in the wake of stunning scientific accomplishment, was slowly losing to science what was left of its cultural authority. With both designer and purpose absent from the post-Darwinian world, the old religious orders appeared trivial, and humankind found itself dislodged from the centre of the natural order. This view of nature plunged Frost into a spiritual crisis, which he surmounted by writing poetry. Arguing that the central problem of Frost's career was his conflict with science, Robert Bernard Hass examines the ways in which the conflict affected the development of Frost's career from beginning to end. Hass situates the poet's work in the intellectual ferment of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and argues that as materialism collapsed under the weight of new scientific discovery, Frost began to see science as a historically conditioned mode of perception.

This text grounds environmental literature firmly in the life sciences, particularly evolutionary biology. It attempts to bridge the ever-widening gulf between the ""Two Cultures"". Glen Love - a founder of ecocriticism - argues that literary studies has been diminshed by a general lack of recognition for the vital role that the biological foundation of human life plays in cultural imagination. He presents with clarity and directness a model for how to incorporate Darwinian ideas - the basis for all modern biology and ecology - into ecocritical thinking. Beginning with an overview of the field of literature and environment and its claim to our attention and arguing for a biologically informed theoretical base for literary studies, Love then aims the lens of this critical perspective on the pastoral genre and works by canonical writers such as Willa Cather, Ernet Hemingway and William Dean Howells. This interdisciplinary work should be of interest to the entire ecocritical community, as well as humanists, social scientists and others concerned with the rediscovery of human nature.

The nineteenth-century photographer William Henry Jackson once complained of the skepticism with which early descriptions of Yellowstone were met: the place was too wondrous to be believed. The public demanded proof, and a host of artists and writers obliged. These early explorers possessed a vigorous devotion to the young nation's wilderness - the naturalist John Muir famously toured the land from Wisconsin to Florida on foot - and through their work established aesthetic categories that exist to this day. In Lines on the Land, Scott Herring contends that these writers and artists were canon makers, recognizing the national parks as naturally occurring works of art and conferring upon them a cultural prestige: the parks were the splendid focal points of the American landscape. These early, canonizing works are homages to a vast, untouched wilderness. This praise would gradually give way, however, to a distinctly American anger - what Herring calls ""outraged idealism."" Later generations were faced with a changing culture that had imperfectly absorbed, and even misrepresented, the national-park aesthetic. The postwar park was overrun by cars and tourists who could not possibly match the pioneering naturalists' profound commitment to and appreclation for their surroundings. The collective tone of the parks' chroniclers, as a result, evolved from celebration of awesome beauty to indignation over the perceived corruption of the parks, both as an ideal and as actual physical settings. Herring traces this shift through the work of a wide spectrum of creative minds, from early figures such as Muir and Thomas Moran to later observers of the parks such as Ansel Adams, Sylvia Plath, Edward Abbey, and Rick Bass. The text is punctuated by autobiographical ""interchapters"" in which Herring relates the book's chief themes to his own experiences in Yellowstone National Park.

Best known for The Land of Little Rain, a collection of natural-history essays about the California deserts, the Western writer Mary Austin (1868-1934) was a prolific literary figure in the first few decades of the twentieth century. In addition to her essays and short stories, Austin produced novels, poems, and cultural criticism, and was well known as a feminist, political writer, and mystic. Over the past decade a number of Austin's books have been reissued and her work has been the subject of increasing critical attention. Heike Schaefer's study complements that renewed interest with a fresh, broad appreciation of the complexity of Austin's work. Considering unpublished materials and the full range of Austin's literary and theoretical writing, Mary Austin's Regionalism presents Austin as a significant early twentieth-century author who reworked the traditions of nature writing and women's regionalism to envision a sustainable and democratic American culture. Austin brought an environmental awareness to the exploration of the race, gender, and class dynamics informing the European American colonization of the West.

The paradoxical role nature plays in American myth and history grows in part from the male's reverent fascination with the wilderness and his equally strong impulse to dominate it. Many canonical literary works - think of Thoreau, Melville, Hemingway, Faulkner - look to the wild as the site for establishing a man's selfhood. But nature is just as often subjected to his most violent displays of mastery. This tension lies at the heart of Eco-Man, which brings together two rapidly growing fields: men's studies and ecocriticism. The two disciplines have rarely if ever touched on each other; brought together, men's studies is freed from its typical limitation of an exclusively urban-centered perspective, while ecocriticism engages an ""ecomasculine"" lens through which to view the field. The book's contents are diverse, but the contributors all challenge our idea of masculinity as merely the social code of patriarchy. By complicating our cultural notions of nature and masculinity, the volume's twenty essays question whether we can construct a notion of manhood around ecological principles and practices - and if so, what this would look like, and how it would enrich men's studies. The varied assembly of contributors to Eco-Man - including historians, philosophers, poets, both male and female - have all written with the general reader in mind. The result is a book as approachable as it is groundbreaking.

The paradoxical role nature plays in American myth and history grows in part from the male's reverent fascination with the wilderness and his equally strong impulse to dominate it. Many canonical literary works - think of Thoreau, Melville, Hemingway, Faulkner - look to the wild as the site for establishing a man's selfhood. But nature is just as often subjected to his most violent displays of mastery. This tension lies at the heart of Eco-Man, which brings together two rapidly growing fields: men's studies and ecocriticism. The two disciplines have rarely if ever touched on each other; brought together, men's studies is freed from its typical limitation of an exclusively urban-centered perspective, while ecocriticism engages an ""ecomasculine"" lens through which to view the field. The book's contents are diverse, but the contributors all challenge our idea of masculinity as merely the social code of patriarchy. By complicating our cultural notions of nature and masculinity, the volume's twenty essays question whether we can construct a notion of manhood around ecological principles and practices - and if so, what this would look like, and how it would enrich men's studies. The varied assembly of contributors to Eco-Man - including historians, philosophers, poets, both male and female - have all written with the general reader in mind. The result is a book as approachable as it is groundbreaking.

In Western culture, the separation of humans from nature has contributed to a schism between the conscious reason and the unconscious dreaming psyche, or internal human ""nature."" Our increasing lack of intimacy with the land has led to a decreased capacity to access parts of the psyche not normally valued in a capitalist culture. In ""Out of the Shadow: Ecopsychology, Story, and Encounters with the Land"", Rinda West uses Jung's idea of the shadow to explore how this divorce results in alienation, projection, and often breakdown. Bringing together ideas from analytical psychology, environmental thought, and literary studies, West explores a variety of literary texts - including several by contemporary American Indian writers - to show, through a sort of geography of the psyche, how alienation from nature reflects a parallel separation from the ""nature"" that constitutes the unconscious. Through her analysis of narratives that offer images of people confronting shadow, reconnecting with nature, and growing psychologically and ethically, West reveals that when characters enter into relationship with the natural world, they are better able to confront and reclaim shadow. By writing ""from the shadows,"" West argues that contemporary writers are exploring ways of being human that have the potential for creating more just and honorable relationships with nature, and more sustainable communities. For ecocritics, conservation activists, scholars and students of environmental studies and American Indian studies, and ecopsychologists, ""Out of the Shadow"" offers hope for humans wishing to reconcile with themselves, with nature, and with community.

The pivotal figure in ""Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa"" is the nineteenth-century diplomat and writer George Perkins Marsh, generally regarded as America's first environmentalist. Like Elder, Marsh was a Vermonter, and his diplomatic career took him for some years to Italy, where, witnessing the ecological devastation wrought upon the landscape by runaway deforestation and the plundering of other natural resources, he was moved to produce his famous manifesto, ""Man and Nature"". Marsh drew parallels between the despoiled Italian environment and his home landscape of Vermont, warning that the latter was vulnerable to ecological woes of a similar magnitude if not carefully maintained and protected. In short, his was a prescient voice for stewardship.Elder follows in Marsh's footsteps along a trajectory running from Vermont to Italy, and at length fetches up at the managed forest of Vallombrosa. Punctuated throughout with learned and genial considerations of the poetry of Wordsworth, Basho, Dante, and Frost, Elder's narrative takes up issues of sustainability as practiced locally, reports on family doings, and returns finally - as did Marsh's - to Vermont, where he measures traditional stewardship values against more aggressive conservation-oriented measures such as the expansion of wilderness areas.

Engaging important discussions about social conflict, environmental change, and imperialism in Africa, Different Shades of Green points to legacies of African environmental writing, often neglected as a result of critical perspectives shaped by dominant Western conceptions of nature and environmentalism. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework employing postcolonial studies, political ecology, environmental history, and writing by African environmental activists, Byron Caminero-Santangelo emphasizes connections within African environmental literature, highlighting how African writers have challenged unjust, ecologically destructive forms of imperial development and resource extraction.Different Shades of Green also brings into dialogue a wide range of African creative writing - including works by Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, Nuruddin Farah, Wangari Maathai, and Ken Saro-Wiwa - in order to explore vexing questions for those involved in the struggle for environmental justice, in the study of political ecology, and in the environmental humanities, urging continued imaginative thinking in effecting a more equitable, sustainable future in Africa.

Engaging important discussions about social conflict, environmental change, and imperialism in Africa, Different Shades of Green points to legacies of African environmental writing, often neglected as a result of critical perspectives shaped by dominant Western conceptions of nature and environmentalism. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework employing postcolonial studies, political ecology, environmental history, and writing by African environmental activists, Byron Caminero-Santangelo emphasizes connections within African environmental literature, highlighting how African writers have challenged unjust, ecologically destructive forms of imperial development and resource extraction.Different Shades of Green also brings into dialogue a wide range of African creative writing - including works by Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, Nuruddin Farah, Wangari Maathai, and Ken Saro-Wiwa - in order to explore vexing questions for those involved in the struggle for environmental justice, in the study of political ecology, and in the environmental humanities, urging continued imaginative thinking in effecting a more equitable, sustainable future in Africa.

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.

Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earth’s atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction. This period of observable human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems has been called the Anthropocene Age. The anthropogenic climate change that has impacted the Earth has also affected our literature, but criticism of the contemporary novel has not adequately recognized the literary response to this level of environmental crisis. Ecocriticism’s theories of place and planet, meanwhile, are troubled by a climate that is neither natural nor under human control. Anthropocene Fictions is the first systematic examination of the hundreds of novels that have been written about anthropogenic climate change.Drawing on climatology, the sociology and philosophy of science, geography, and environmental economics, Adam Trexler argues that the novel has become an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate change. The novel expands the reach of climate science beyond the laboratory or model, turning abstract predictions into subjectively tangible experiences of place, identity, and culture. Political and economic organizations are also being transformed by their struggle for sustainability. In turn, the novel has been forced to adapt to new boundaries between truth and fabrication, nature and economies, and individual choice and larger systems of natural phenomena. Anthropocene Fictions argues that new modes of inhabiting climate are of the utmost critical and political importance, when unprecedented scientific consensus has failed to lead to action.

Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earth’s atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction. This period of observable human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems has been called the Anthropocene Age. The anthropogenic climate change that has impacted the Earth has also affected our literature, but criticism of the contemporary novel has not adequately recognized the literary response to this level of environmental crisis. Ecocriticism’s theories of place and planet, meanwhile, are troubled by a climate that is neither natural nor under human control. Anthropocene Fictions is the first systematic examination of the hundreds of novels that have been written about anthropogenic climate change.Drawing on climatology, the sociology and philosophy of science, geography, and environmental economics, Adam Trexler argues that the novel has become an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate change. The novel expands the reach of climate science beyond the laboratory or model, turning abstract predictions into subjectively tangible experiences of place, identity, and culture. Political and economic organizations are also being transformed by their struggle for sustainability. In turn, the novel has been forced to adapt to new boundaries between truth and fabrication, nature and economies, and individual choice and larger systems of natural phenomena. Anthropocene Fictions argues that new modes of inhabiting climate are of the utmost critical and political importance, when unprecedented scientific consensus has failed to lead to action.

In the past thirty years biodiversity has become one of the central organizing principles through which we understand the nonhuman environment. Its deceptively simple definition as the variation among living organisms masks its status as a hotly contested term both within the sciences and more broadly. In Eden’s Endemics, Elizabeth Callaway looks to cultural objects—novels, memoirs, databases, visualizations, and poetry— that depict many species at once to consider the question of how we narrate organisms in their multiplicity.Touching on topics ranging from seed banks to science fiction to bird-watching, Callaway argues that there is no set, generally accepted way to measure biodiversity. Westerners tend to conceptualize it according to one or more of an array of tropes rooted in colonial history such as the Lost Eden, Noah’s Ark, and Tree-of-Life imagery. These conceptualizations affect what kinds of biodiversities are prioritized for protection. While using biodiversity as a way to talk about the world aims to highlight what is most valued in nature, it can produce narratives that reinforce certain power differentials—with real-life consequences for conservation projects. Thus the choices made when portraying biodiversity impact what is visible, what is visceral, and what is unquestioned common sense about the patterns of life on Earth.

A hierarchical model of human societies' relations with the natural world is at the root of today's climate crisis; Narrating the Mesh contends that narrative form is instrumental in countering this ideology. Drawing inspiration from Timothy Morton's concept of the ""mesh"" as a metaphor for the human-nonhuman relationship in the face of climate change, Marco Caracciolo investigates how narratives in genres such as the novel and the short story employ formal devices to effectively channel the entanglement of human communities and nonhuman phenomena.How can narrative undermine linearity in order to reject notions of unlimited technological progress and economic growth? What does it mean to say that nonhuman materials and processes from contaminated landscapes to natural evolution can become characters in stories? And, conversely, how can narrative trace the rising awareness of climate change in the thick of human characters' mental activities? These are some of the questions Narrating the Mesh addresses by engaging with contemporary works by Ted Chiang, Emily St. John Mandel, Richard Powers, Jeff VanderMeer, Jeanette Winterson, and many others. Entering interdisciplinary debates on narrative and the Anthropocene, this book explores how stories can bridge the gap between scientific models of the climate and the human-scale world of everyday experience, powerfully illustrating the complexity of the ecological crisis at multiple levels.

A hierarchical model of human societies' relations with the natural world is at the root of today's climate crisis; Narrating the Mesh contends that narrative form is instrumental in countering this ideology. Drawing inspiration from Timothy Morton's concept of the ""mesh"" as a metaphor for the human-nonhuman relationship in the face of climate change, Marco Caracciolo investigates how narratives in genres such as the novel and the short story employ formal devices to effectively channel the entanglement of human communities and nonhuman phenomena.How can narrative undermine linearity in order to reject notions of unlimited technological progress and economic growth? What does it mean to say that nonhuman materials and processes from contaminated landscapes to natural evolution can become characters in stories? And, conversely, how can narrative trace the rising awareness of climate change in the thick of human characters' mental activities? These are some of the questions Narrating the Mesh addresses by engaging with contemporary works by Ted Chiang, Emily St. John Mandel, Richard Powers, Jeff VanderMeer, Jeanette Winterson, and many others. Entering interdisciplinary debates on narrative and the Anthropocene, this book explores how stories can bridge the gap between scientific models of the climate and the human-scale world of everyday experience, powerfully illustrating the complexity of the ecological crisis at multiple levels.