Bøger i Under the Sign of Nature serien

Explores the interplay between bodies, soil, industrial emissions, and the wealth of dynamic particulate matter that passes in between. At the same time, the book emphasizes the crucial function of narrative expression for making sense of this modern-day reality and for shifting existing power dynamics as exposed communities exercise their voices.

What makes trash trash? How do we decide what to throw away? Driven by these questions and others, Samuel Amago takes us through the streets and alleys of Spain, sorting through recycling bins, libraries, social media, bookstores, and message boards in search of things that have been forgotten, jettisoned, forsaken.

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 channel the entanglement of human communities and nonhuman phenomena.

Set against the backdrop of Herman Melville's literary, philosophical, and scientific influences, Magnificent Decay focuses on four of his most neglected works to demonstrate that, together, literature and science offer collective insights into the past, present, and future turbulence of the Anthropocene.

"In a narrative that touches on topics ranging from seed banks to science fiction to birdwatching, Callaway argues--through a variety of media and genres--that there is no set, generally accepted way to measure biodiversity"--

Exploring the early green culture of Arts and Crafts to women's formation of rural utopian communities, to the Women's Land Army and herbalists of the Great War and beyond, New Woman Ecologies shows how women established both their own autonomy and the viability of an ecological modernity.

The oral poets of the amaXhosa people have long shaped understandings of history and offered a forum for grappling with change. This book examines the role of these poets in South African society and the ways in which they have helped inform responses to apartheid, the injustices of extractive capitalism, and contemporary politics in South Africa.

Situated in a mid-Victorian moment of frenetic plant collecting from the far reaches of the British empire, Novel Cultivations recognises plants as vital and sentient subjects that serve - often more so than people - as actors and narrative engines in the nineteenth-century novel.

Most of the Old Norse texts that preserve the myths of Ragnarok originated in Iceland. As the first full-length ecocritical study of Old Norse myth and literature, Evergreen Ash argues that Ragnarok is primarily a story of ecological collapse that reflects the anxieties of early Icelanders who were trying to make a home in a hostile environment.

Analyses work written since the year 2000 by thirteen North American poets, all of whom push the bounds of literary convention as they seek forms and language adequate to complex environmental problems. These poets respond to environments transformed by people and take "nature" to be a far more inclusive and culturally imbricated category than conventional nature poetry does.

Explores the influence of landscape architecture, city planning, and parks management on American poetry to show how modernists engaged with the green worlds and social playgrounds created in the early twentieth century. Through a combination of ecocriticism, urban studies, and historical geography, this book unveils the neglected urban context for seemingly natural landscapes in modernist poems.

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.

Hess explores Wordsworth's defining role in establishing what he designates as `the ecology of authorship': a primarily middle-class, nineteenth-century conception of nature associated with aesthetics, high culture, individualism, and nation. Instead of viewing Wordsworth as an early ecologist, Hess places him within a context that is largely cultural and aesthetic.

In a sequence of publications in the 1760s, James Macpherson, a Scottish schoolteacher in the central Highlands, created fantastic epics of ancient heroes and presented them as genuine translations of the poetry of Ossian, a fictionalized Caledonian bard of the third century. In Ossianic Unconformities Eric Gidal introduces the idiosyncratic publications of a group of nineteenth-century Scottish eccentrics who used statistics, cartography, and geomorphology to map and thereby vindicate Macpherson's controversial eighteenth-century renderings of Gaelic oral traditions. Although these writers primarily sought to establish the authenticity of Macpherson's "e;translations,"e; they came to record, through promotion, evasion, and confrontation, the massive changes being wrought upon Scottish and Irish lands by British industrialization. Their obsessive and elaborate attempts to fix both the poetry and the land into a stable set of coordinates developed what we can now perceive as a nascent ecological perspective on literature in a changing world.Gidal examines the details of these imaginary geographies in conjunction with the social and spatial histories of Belfast and the River Lagan valley, Glasgow and the Firth of Clyde, and the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland, regions that form both the sixth-century kingdom of Dl Riata and the fabled terrain of the Ossianic poems. Combining environmental and industrial histories with the reception of the poems of Ossian, Ossianic Unconformities unites literary history and book studies with geography, cartography, and geology to present and consider imaginative responses to environmental catastrophe.

The smoke-laden fog of London is one of the most vivid elements in English literature, richly suggestive and blurring boundaries between nature and society in compelling ways. In The Sky of Our Manufacture, Jesse Oak Taylor uses the many depictions of the London fog in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel to explore the emergence of anthropogenic climate change. In the process, Taylor argues for the importance of fiction in understanding climatic shifts, environmental pollution, and ecological collapse. The London fog earned the portmanteau "e;smog"e; in 1905, a significant recognition of what was arguably the first instance of a climatic phenomenon manufactured by modern industry. Tracing the path to this awareness opens a critical vantage point on the Anthropocene, a new geologic age in which the transformation of humanity into a climate-changing force has not only altered our physical atmosphere but imbued it with new meanings. The book examines enduringly popular works--from the novels of Charles Dickens and George Eliot to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, and the Sherlock Holmes mysteries to works by Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf--alongside newspaper cartoons, scientific writings, and meteorological technologies to reveal a fascinating relationship between our cultural climate and the sky overhead.Under the Sign of Nature: Studies in Ecocriticism

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.Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

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. Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

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, NgA gA 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.

"e;Set aside your Bella Tuscanys and Year in Provences for a different kind of travel book. Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa puts a walking stick in your hand and Marsh's Man and Nature in your knapsack, exploring how Italians have managed their natural and cultural heritage in ways that sustain both. John Elder's poetic meditations on land and life demonstrate that only by searching beyond our familiar boundaries can we discover better ways of living back at home."e;-Marcus Hall, author of Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration "e;This collaboration-between George Perkins Marsh and John Elder, between Vermont and Italy, between maple and olive-is one of the smartest, soundest, deepest books about the relationship between people and nature that I've ever read. It will be a classic."e;-Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature"e;Elder's impassioned pilgrimage shows us how to delight in messy wilderness, to secure a curative habitation of the world, and, with Marsh, to lend ecological nous to our gravest task: knowing ourselves and respecting one another. Let the maple seeds and olive stones of Elder's visionary harvest restore to us a reflective and redemptory future."e;-from the foreword by David LowenthalThe 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. John Elder, Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, is the author of Reading the Mountains of Home and The Frog Run.Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

We are living in the midst of the Earth's sixth great extinction event, the first one caused by a single species: our own. In Wild Dog Dreaming, Deborah Bird Rose explores what constitutes an ethical relationship with nonhuman others in this era of loss. She asks, Who are we, as a species? How do we fit into the Earth's systems? Amidst so much change, how do we find our way into new stories to guide us? Rose explores these questions in the form of a dialogue between science and the humanities. Drawing on her conversations with Aboriginal people, for whom questions of extinction are up-close and very personal, Rose develops a mode of exposition that is dialogical, philosophical, and open-ended.An inspiration for Rose-and a touchstone throughout her book-is the endangered dingo of Australia. The dingo is not the first animal to face extinction, but its story is particularly disturbing because the threat to its future is being actively engineered by humans. The brazenness with which the dingo is being wiped out sheds valuable, and chilling, light on the likely fate of countless other animal and plant species."e;People save what they love,"e; observed Michael Soul the great conservation biologist. We must ask whether we, as humans, are capable of loving-and therefore capable of caring for-the animals and plants that are disappearing in a cascade of extinctions. Wild Dog Dreaming engages this question, and the result is a bold account of the entangled ethics of love, contingency, and desire.

Recent decades have witnessed an explosion of interest in both autobiography and environmental literature. In Refiguring the Map of Sorrow, Mark Allister brings these two genres together by examining a distinct form of grief narrative, in which the writers deal with mourning by standing explicitly both outside and inside the text: outside in writing about the natural world; inside in making that exposition part of the grieving process.Building on Peter Fritzell's thesis in Nature Writing and America that the best American nature writing blends Aristotelian natural history and Augustinian confession, this work of literary interpretation draws on psychoanalytical narrative theory, studies of grieving, autobiography theory, and ecocriticism for its insights into how nature writing can become an autobiographical, healing act. Allister examines works by Terry Tempest Williams, Sue Hubbell, Peter Matthiessen, Bill Barich, William Least Heat-Moon, and Gretel Ehrlich in order to demonstrate the difficulty of hearing nature speak, and of translating terrain and self into language and form. As he focuses on the many ways in which humans connect-often deeply and urgently-to animals or the land, Allister vastly extends our understanding of "e;relational"e; autobiography.

Bringing together new writing by some of the field's most compelling voices from the United States and Europe, this is the first book to examine Italy - as a territory of both matter and imagination - through the lens of the environmental humanities. The contributors offer a wide spectrum of approaches to move past cliche and reimagine Italy as a hybrid, plural, eloquent place.

Bringing together new writing by some of the field's most compelling voices from the United States and Europe, this is the first book to examine Italy - as a territory of both matter and imagination - through the lens of the environmental humanities. The contributors offer a wide spectrum of approaches to move past cliche and reimagine Italy as a hybrid, plural, eloquent place.