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The Epic World
Reconceptualizing the epic genre and opening it up to a world of storytelling, The Epic World makes a timely and bold intervention toward understanding the human propensity to aestheticize and normalize mass deployments of power and violence. The collection broadly considers three kinds of epic literature: conventional celebratory tales of conquest that glorify heroism, especially male heroism; anti-epics or stories of conquest from the perspectives of the dispossessed, the oppressed, the despised, and the murdered; and heroic stories utilized for imperialist or nationalist purposes. The Epic World illustrates global patterns of epic storytelling, such as the durability of stories tied to re...
Brill's Companion to Callimachus
Few figures from Greco-Roman antiquity have undergone as much reassessment in recent decades as Callimachus of Cyrene, who was active at the Alexandrian court of the Ptolemies during the early third century BC. Once perceived as a supreme example of ivory tower detachment and abstruse learning, Callimachus has now come to be understood as an artificer of the images of a powerful and vibrant court and as a poet second only to Homer in his later reception. For the modern audience, the fragmentation of his texts and the diffusion of source materials has often impeded understanding his poetic achievement. Brill’s Companion to Callimachus has been designed to aid in negotiating this scholarly terrain, especially the process of editing and collecting his fragments, to illuminate his intellectual and social contexts, and to indicate the current directions that his scholarship is taking.
Georgic Literature and the Environment
This expansive edited collection explores in depth the georgic genre and its connections to the natural world. Together, its chapters demonstrate that georgic—a genre based primarily on two classical poems about farming, Virgil’s Georgics and Hesiod’s Works and Days—has been reworked by writers throughout modern and early modern English-language literary history as a way of thinking about humans’ relationships with the environment. The book is divided into three sections: Defining Georgic, Managing Nature and Eco-Georgic for the Anthropocene. It centres the georgic genre in the ecocritical conversation, giving it equal prominence with pastoral, elegy and lyric as an example of ‘n...
Risk, Disaster, and Vulnerability
"Over the course of the past century, there has been a sustained reflective engagement about environmental risks, disasters, and human vulnerability in the technocene (a term used by some humanist scholars to characterize the era in which we live, characterized by complex technologies with accompanying hazards that can potentially harm human societies and their living environments on historically unprecedented scales). This inquiry has raised a host of crucial questions. Just how safe in humanity is in a world of toxic chemicals and industrial installations that have destructive potential? What are the discordant consequences of the transformations of the natural world by twentieth century technologies? To what extent is it feasible to contain chemical, nuclear, and other pollutants? Is it at all possible to prevent runaway disasters in highly complex industrial technoscapes? In what way do environmental hazards impact social and political orders? The purpose of this essay is to help scholars and indeed ordinary citizens not versed in the extent literature in scientific, public policy and humanistic genres, understand their social theoretic import"--
Elemental Narratives
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. Giving equal weight to readings of fiction, nonfiction, works of visual art, and physical sites, Enrico Cesaretti investigates the interconnected stories emerging from both human creativity and t...
Relations 4.1 - June 2016
Table of Contents: Past the Human: Narrative Ontologies and Ontological Stories. Editorial, Serenella Iovino, Roberto Marchesini, Eleonora Adorni - Posthumanism in Literature and Ecocriticism. Introduction, Serenella Iovino - From Posthumanism to Posthuman Ecocriticim, Serpil Oppermann - Threatening Animals?, Heather I. Sullivan - The Posthuman that Could Have Been: Mary Shelley’s Creature, Margarita Carretero González - Gadda’s Pasticciaccio and the Knotted Posthuman Household, Deborah Amberson, Elena Past - Posthuman Spaces of Relation: Literary Responses to the Species Boundary in Primate Literature, Diana Villanueva Romero - Can the Humanities Become Post-human? Interview with Rosi Braidotti, Cosetta Veronese - Recent Approaches in the Posthuman Turn: Braidotti, Herbrechter, and Nayar, Başak Ağın Dönmez - More-than-green Ecologies, Christopher Schliephake - Posthuman Narratives, Italian Style, Emiliano Guaraldo - Deep Breathing Ecocriticism: Stories, Matter, and Spiritual Dimensions, Alessandro Macilenti
The Social Life of Unsustainable Mass Consumption
The Social Life of Unsustainable Mass Consumption draws on a variety of theories and research to contribute to our understanding of unsustainable mass consumption. It addresses the role of identities, social relations, interactions, belonging, and status comparison, and how perceived time scarcity is both a cause and an effect of consumption. It examines the power of consumer norms and how overconsumption is normalized and shows how consumption is embedded in the time-space arrangements of everyday life. Magnus Boström contextualizes such drivers within the larger institutional and infrastructural forces underlying mass consumption, including the economy, growth politics, and the problematic promises of consumer culture. Boström further draws on lessons from lived experiments of consuming less and discuss how insights about the flaws of consumer culture can help shape a growing critique and countermovement – a collective detox from consumerism.
Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity
Although current environmental debates lay the focus on the Industrial Revolution as a sociopolitical development that has led to the current environmental crisis, many ecocritical projects have avoided historicizing their concepts or have been characterized by approaches that were either pre-historic or post-historic: while the environmental movement has harbored the dream of restoring nature to a state untouched by human hands, there is also the pessimistic vision of a post-apocalyptic world, exhausted by humanity’s consumption of natural resources. Against this background, the decline of nature has become a narrative template quite common among the public environmental discourse and env...
Zones of Focused Ambiguity in Siri Hustvedt’s Works
This collection comprises essays from various interdisciplinary perspectives – e.g. literary scholarship, intermediality, art history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and medicine – to analyze and interpret the fictional and non-fictional works by Siri Hustvedt, an author whose reputation and public presence have been growing steadily in the 21st century and who is recognized as one of the most widely read and appreciated contemporary American writers. In her significance and stature as a public intellectual, she is not merely an American writer but a transnational, cosmopolitan author, who develops new forms not only of literary narrative but of interdisciplinary thought and writing, bringi...
Reading Aridity in Western American Literature
In literary and cinematic representations, deserts often betoken collapse and dystopia. Reading Aridity in Western American Literature offers readings of literature set in the American Southwest from ecocritical and new materialist perspectives. This book explores the diverse epistemologies, histories, relationships, futures, and possibilities that emerge from the representation of American deserts in fiction, film, and literary art, and traces the social, cultural, economic, and biotic narratives that foreground deserts, prompting us to reconsider new, provocative modes of human/nonhuman engagement in arid ecogeographies.
