You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Modernism and the Anthropocene explores twentieth-century literature as it engages with the non-human world across a range of contexts. From familiar modernist works by D.H. Lawrence and Hart Crane to still-emergent genres like comics and speculative fiction, this volume tackles a series of related questions regarding how best to understand humanity’s increasing domination of the natural world.
One of the most pivotal developments in contemporary literary and cultural studies is the investigation of space and geography, a trend which is proving particularly important for modernist studies. This volume explores the interface between modernism and geography in a range of writers, texts and artists across the twentieth century. Cross-disciplinary essays test and extend a variety of methodological approaches and reveal the reach of this topic into every corner of modernist scholarship. From Imagist poetry and the Orient to teashops and modernism in London, or from mapping and belonging in James Joyce or Joseph Conrad to the space of new media artists, this remarkable volume offers fresh, invigorating research that ranges across the field of modernism. It also serves to identify the many exciting new directions that future studies may take. With groundbreaking essays from an international team of highly-regarded scholars, Geographies of Modernism is an important step forward in literary and cultural studies.
British Modernism and the Anthropocene: Experiments with Time assesses the environmental politics of modernism in relation to the idea of the Anthropocene--a proposed geological epoch in which humans have fundamentally changed the Earth System. The early twentieth century was marked by environmental transformations that were so complex and happened on such great scales that they defied representation. Modernist novelists responded with a range of innovative narrative forms that started to make environmental crisis on a planetary scale visible. Paradoxically, however, it is their failures to represent such a crisis that achieve the greatest success. David Shackleton explores how British moder...
In a view that sweeps from the tenth century to the mid 16th century, this text shows how the English people's concern with their island's relative isolation on the global map contributed to the emergence of a distinctive English national consciousness in which marginality came to be seen as a virtue.
Following Françoise d’Eaubonne’s creation of the term “ecofeminism” in 1974, scholars around the world have explored ways that the degradation of the environment and the subjugation of women are linked. In the nearly three decades since the publication of the classical work Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva in 1993, several collections have appeared that apply ecofeminism to literary criticism, also known as feminist ecocriticism. The most recent of these include anthologies that emphasize international perspectives, furthering the comparative task launched by Mies and Shiva. To date, however, there have been no books devoted to gaining a broad-based understanding of feminist ecocriticism in India, understood in its own terms. Our new volume Indian Feminist Ecocriticism offers a survey of literature as seen through an ecofeminist lens by Indian scholars, which places contemporary literary analysis through a sampling of its diverse languages and in the context of millennia-old mythic traditions of India.
Shamanism in the Contemporary Novel examines how shamanism is used as a significant trope in a selection of novels. Özlem Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu contends that the shamanic figures and societies featured in these works have been subjected to marginalization, dislocation, and dispossession through imperialist, colonialist, and capitalist encroachments in different historical contexts.
Reorienting the field of American literary modernism, Christopher Schedler defines an intercultural form of representation termed border modernism that challenges the aesthetic hegemony of metropolitan (high) modernism. In this study, Schedler compares the works of European and Anglo-American modernists with the works of Mexican, Native American, and Chicano writers who engaged with modernist theories and practices. In the process he uncovers a unique intercultural aesthetic produced in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico aimed at modernizing the native literary traditions of the Americas. Addressing issues of migration, cultural identity, and ethnography, Border Modernism is a major contribution to current debates over the origins and development of American literary modernism and a new model for transnational and intercultural reconstructions of American literary history.
Avian Aesthetics in Literature and Culture: Birds and Humans in the Popular Imagination closes the gap between ornithological and humanities knowledge. This book contains fifteen innovative essays that bridge various environment-focused perspectives and methodologies in order to include birds in current conversations within the field of animal studies. This collection challenges species centrism, advances a biodiverse ontology, and embraces bird-centered topics as diverse as gaming, comic strips, window collisions, conservation literature, youth birding, mourning theory, and the “Birds Aren’t Real” movement.
Simon Joyce examines heritage culture, contemporary politics, and the "neo-Dickensian" novel to offer a more affirmative assessment of the Victorian legacy, one that lets us imagine a model of social interconnection and interdependence that has come under threat in today's politics and culture.
Through attending to the nonhuman, E. M. Forster’s Material Humanism: Queer Matters places Forster’s fiction in conversation with contemporary debates concerned with the intersection of neomaterialism, environmental humanities and queer ecology. The book revisits Forster’s liberal humanism from a materialist perspective by focusing on humans’ embodied activities in artificial and natural environments. By examining the everyday embodied experiences of characters, the book thus brings to the fore insignificant and sometimes overlooked aspects in Forster’s fiction. It also places importance on the texts’ treatment of queer intimacy as an embodied experience that can transcend sexual desire. The book acknowledges nonhuman agency as central to our understanding of queerness in Forster’s texts and studies the representation of formless matters such as dust as a way through which Forster’s ecological concerns arise by linking the fate of oppressed humans with oppressed nonhuman others.