Ecocriticism and Geocriticism

Although treated as two distinct schools of thought, ecocriticism and geocriticism have both placed emphasis on the lived environment, whether through social or natural spaces. For the first time, this interdisciplinary collection of essays addresses the complementary and contested aspects of these approaches to literature, culture, and society.

"This is a timely volume that engages with a significant and growing area of literary and cultural studies. For some time there have been two largely distinct schools - place studies and spatial theory - that explore related but rarely linked ideas. This collection is designed to help bring these two approaches together. And it does so admirably. It is a significant contribution and will help to reconcile the differing strands of place and spatial theory. I learned a lot from it and I am sure other readers will as well." - Tom Lynch, Professor of English, University of Nebraska, USA

Auteur
Robert T. Tally Jr. is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University, USA. He is the author of Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism; Poe and the Subversion of American Literature; Spatiality (The New Critical Idiom); Utopia in the Age of Globalization; and, as editor, Geocritical Explorations, Literary Cartographies, and The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said.

Christine M. Battista is the Chair of Media and Communication Studies and Assistant Professor of English at Johnson and Wales University, USA, where she teaches critical media studies, literary theory, American literature, and postcolonial literature.

Texte du rabat
The contributors to Ecocriticism and Geocriticism survey the overlapping territories of these critical practices, demonstrating through their diversity of interests, as well as their range of topics, texts, periods, genres, methods, and perspectives, just how rich and varied ecocritical and geocritical approaches can be. As diffuse 'schools' of criticism, ecocriticism and geocriticism represent two relatively recent discourses through which literary and cultural studies have placed renewed emphasis on the lived environment, social and natural spaces, spatiotemporality, ecology, history, and geography. These loosely defined practices have also fostered politically engaged inquiries into the ways that humans not only represent, but also organize the spaces and places in which they, their fellow humans, and many other forms of life must dwell. These essays exemplify the ways in which critics may bring environmental and spatial literary studies to bear on each other, enabling readers to looks at both literature and their surroundings differently.

Contenu

Introduction: Ecocritical Geographies, Geocritical Ecologies, and the Spaces of Modernity; Robert T. Tally Jr. and Christine M. Battista
PART I: TRANS-THEORETICAL PRACTICES

1. Geocriticism Meets Ecocriticism: Bertrand Westphal and Environmental Thinking; Eric Prieto
2. Ecocritical and Geocritical Conjunctions in North Atlantic Environmental Multimedia and Place-Based Poetry; Derek Gladwin
3. Noncommittal Commitment: Alien Spaces of Ecocosmopolitics in Recent World Literature; Ted Geier
   PART II: SURVEYING TERRITORIES
4. Affective Edgelands: Wildness, History and Technology in Britain's Post-industrial and Post-natural Topographies; Tom Bristow
5. 'The sea was the river, the river the sea': The Severn Estuary and the Bristol Channel in Robert Minhinnick and Philip Gross; Louise Chamberlain
6. Black Jungle, Beautiful Forest: A Postcolonial, Green Geocriticism of the Indian Sundarbans; Luca Raimondi
   PART III: ECOCRITICAL EXPLORATIONS
7. Outside Within: Natural Environment and Social Place in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca; Stanka Radovi?
8. Joseph Hall's Mundus Alter et Idem and the Geo-satirical Indictment of the English Crown; Dan Mills
9. Nature and the Oppressed Female Body in Nora Okja Keller's Ecofeminist Aesthetics; Silvia Schultermandl
10. Toward an Environmental Imagination of Displacement in Contemporary Transnational American Poetry; Judith Rauscher