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In The End of the Anthropocene, Michael J. Gormley examines literary imaginations of the anthropocene's end and the future of the astropocene. Gormley analyzes literary images of human tracks on Earth, the Moon, and Mars to characterize the late-stage anthropocene and to explore humanity's role in the universal ecosystem. The End of the Anthropocene uses a predictive and paradigmatic model of ecocriticism, examining science fiction works as interplanetary nature narratives.

While there is no lack of scholarship on the trans-Atlantic voyage and the Middle Passage as tropes in African diasporic writing, to date there has not been a comprehensive analysis of bodies of water in African American literature and culture. In Water and African American Memory, Anissa Wardi offers the first sustained treatise on watercourses in the African American expressive tradition. Her holistic approach especially highlights the ways that water acts not only as a metaphorical site of t...

Bringing the word sustainability back from the brink of cliché—to a substantive, truly sustainable future    Is sustainability a hopelessly vague word, with meager purpose aside from a feel-good appeal to the consumer? In The Three Sustainabilities, Allan Stoekl seeks to (re)valorize the word, for a simple reason: it is useful. Sustainability designates objects in time, their birth or genesis, their consistency, their survival, their demise. And it raises the question, as no other word does, of...

For more than 40 years Eastern European culture came under the sway of Soviet rule. What is the legacy of this period for cultural attitudes to the environment and the contemporary battle to confront climate change? This is the first in-depth study of the legacy of the Soviet era on attitudes to the environment in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Ukraine. Exploring responses in literature, culture and film to political projects such as the collectivisation of agricultural land, the expansi...

The Encyclopedia of Northern Kentucky is the authoritative reference on the people, places, history, and rich heritage of the Northern Kentucky region. The encyclopedia defines an overlooked region of more than 450,000 residents and celebrates its contributions to agriculture, art, architecture, commerce, education, entertainment, literature, medicine, military, science, and sports. Often referred to as one of the points of the "Golden Triangle" because of its proximity to Lexington and Louisvil...

Confronting Climate Crises through Education: Reading Our Way Forward envisions the responsibility of public education to engage a citizenry more prepared to address the challenges of a changing world. Young advocates a paradigm shift that positions ecopedagogy as the central organizing principle of curriculum and assessment design. Each chapter outlines ways literature can serve as a cultural lens for examining the complex patterns of contexts behind our most pressing climate concerns, includin...

'Marvellous. He sends you straight back to the text, makes you feel like you're returning to an old love' GuardianWhat does it mean to be a self?Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman's bold, new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul. In What Is the Grass keeps company with Whitman and his mutable, landmark work, Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet's life and work.What is it, then, between us? Whitma...

First published in 1990. Balzac, Zola and Faulkner all drew upon the principles of evolutionary theory to represent man's place in nature and his struggle for survival in their major series La Comedie humaine, Rougon-Macquart and the Yoknapatawpha fiction. This book focuses on the 'first' novels in each author's series (La Pere Goriot, La Fortune des Rougon and Flags in the Dust) and considers how each novel relates to its series and derives a definition of the naturalistic roman-fleuve. To desc...

Harnessing new enthusiasm for Nan Shepherd's writing, this book asks how literature might help us to reimagine humanity's place on earth in the midst of our ecological crisis. The first book to examine Shepherd's prose and fiction through an ecocritical lens, The Living World reveals forgotten details about the scientific, political and philosophical climate of early twentieth century Scotland, and offers new understandings of Shepherd's distinctive environmental thought. With a focus on The Liv...

Sustainability and the City: Urban Poetics and Politics contributes to third-generation discourse on sustainable development by considering, through a humanistic lens, theories and practices of sustainability in a wide range of urban cultures. It demonstrates cities' inextricability from discussions on sustainability because not only is the world urbanizing at an unprecedented rate but also cities are primary locations of the circulation of excess capital, socioeconomic divisions and hierarchies...

Rooted in a thriving culture of amateur natural history, the keeping of nature journals and diaries flourished in late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century Britain. As prescientific worldviews ceded to a more materialist outlook informed by an explosion of factual knowledge, lovers of nature both famous and obscure began to use daily composition as a quest for information about and a celebration of their surroundings. A central site of encounter, discovery, and expression, nature diaries took...

Imperial Russia's large wolf populations were demonized, persecuted, tormented, and sometimes admired. That Savage Gaze explores the significance of wolves in pre-revolutionary Russia utilizing the perspectives of cultural studies, ecocriticism, and human-animal studies. It examines the ways in which hunters, writers, conservationists, members of animal protection societies, scientists, doctors, government officials and others contested Russia's "Wolf Problem" and the particular threat posed by...

Modernism and Its Environments surveys new developments in modernist studies inspired by ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Taking a fresh view of familiar topics in modernist studies such as the city, this book also introduces new topics and perspectives on modernism, such as: nature and wilderness; conservation and preservation; energy and fuel; waste and pollution; the animal and the human; and weather and climate. Ecocritical and environmentalist approaches have fundamentally alt...

Conrad and Nature is the first collection of critical essays examining nature and the environment in Joseph Conrad’s writings. Together, these essays by established and emerging scholars reveal both the crucial importance of nature in Conrad’s work, and the vital, ongoing relevance of Conrad’s treatment of the environment in our era of globalization and climate change. No richer subject matter for an environmentally-engaged criticism can be found than the Conradian contexts and themes under inve...

This special issue examines the ways fiction and poetry engage with environmental consciousness, and how African literary criticism addresses the implications of global environmental transformations. Does environmentalist literature offer new possibilities for critical thinking about the future? What constitutes environmentalist fiction and poetry? What kind of texts, themes and topics does climate writing include? Does any text in which the environment features become available to environmental...

We are facing unprecedented environmental challenges, including global climate change, large-scale industrial development, rapidly increasing species extinction, ocean acidification, and deforestation - challenges that require new vocabularies and new ways to express grief and sorrow over the disappearance, degradation, and loss of nature. Seeking to redress the silence around ecologically based anxiety in academic and public domains, and to extend the concepts of sadness, anger, and loss, Mourn...

Environmental writing is an increasingly popular literary genre, and a multifaceted genre at that. Recently dominated by works of 'new nature writing', environmental writing includes works of poetry and fiction about the world around us. In the last two decades, universities have begun to offer environmental writing modules and courses with the intention of teaching students skills in the field of writing inspired by the natural world. This book asks how students are being guided into writing ab...

Over the past century, the Italian landscape has undergone exceedingly rapid transformations, shifting from a mostly rural environment to a decidedly modern world. This changing landscape is endowed with a narrative agency that transforms how we understand our surroundings. Situated at the juncture of Italian studies and ecocriticism and following the recent "material turn" in the environmental humanities, Elemental Narratives outlines an original cultural and environmental map of the bel paese....