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"Meyer pioneers a uniquely political approach to environmental social criticism that follows from a startling central propostion: that it is not outright oppression and denialism that are the most significant impediments but what he aptly terms the 'resonance dilemma.' This is the failure of climate and environmental challenges - however important we may grant that they are - to strike us as integral everyday concerns. This lively, eloquent, accessible volume models the very style of social criticism that it calls for in response to this dilemma: a 'resonant' environmental criticism that works on (rather than against) everyday practices." Lisa Disch, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, author of Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy.
This volume works to connect issues in environmental ethics with the best work in contemporary normative theory. Environmental issues challenge contemporary ethical theorists to account for topics that traditional ethical theories do not address to any significant extent. This book articulates and evaluates consequentialist responses to that challenge. Contributors provide a thorough and well-rounded analysis of the benefits and limitations of the consequentialist perspective in addressing environmental issues. In particular, the contributors use consequentialist theory to address central questions in environmental ethics, such as questions about what kinds of things have value; about decision-making in light of the long-term, intergenerational nature of environmental issues; and about the role that a state’s being natural should play in ethical deliberation.
This volume defines, illustrates, and challenges the field on environmental political theory. Through a broad range of approaches, it shows how scholars have used concepts, methods, and arguments from political theory and closely related disciplines to address contemporary environmental problems.
John Stuart Mill investigates the central elements of the 19th century philosopher’s most profound and influential works, from On Liberty to Utilitarianism and The Subjection of Women. Through close analysis of his primary works, it reveals the very heart of the thinker’s ideas, and examines them in the context of utilitarianism, liberalism and the British empiricism prevalent in Mill’s day. • Presents an analysis of the full range of Mill’s primary writings, getting to the core of the philosopher’s ideas. • Examines the central elements of Mill’s writings in easily accessible prose • Places Mill’s work and thought within the larger cultural and social context of 19th century Britain • Illustrates the continued relevance of Mill’s philosophy to today’s reader
Folk dancer, forester, poet and visionary, Rolf Gardiner (1902-71) is both a compelling and troubling figure in the history of twentieth-century Britain. While he is celebrated as a pioneer of organic farming and co-founder of the Soil Association, Gardiner's organicist outlook was not confined to agriculture alone. Convinced that a healthy culture and society could only flourish when it was rooted in the soil, Gardiner sought national regeneration too. One of the most colourful and controversial figures of the interwar period, Gardiner believed Britain's future lay not with its doomed empire, but in ever closer union with its 'kin folk, kin tongued' neighbours in Germany, the Netherlands an...
Ecocriticism is the emerging academic field which explores nature writing and ecological themes in all literature. Thomas M. Wilson’s book is the first to consider the work of one of the most critically acclaimed and generally popular post-war English writers from an ecocritical perspective. Fowles is best known as a novelist and author of such works as The Magus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Daniel Martin. Going beyond the fiction, this book also examines the many profound reflections on the natural world found in his essays, poems and his recently published Journals. John Fowles’ writings have cast light on the ways we perceive the natural world, from curious scientific observer to Wordsworthian lover of natural places, as well as many other important and, at this time, crucial themes. This volume will be of interest to critics and readers of contemporary fiction, but most of all, to anyone curious about their place in the recurrent green universe that is our earth.
In this, the first collection of ecocritical essays devoted to Australian contexts and their writers, Australian and US scholars explore the transliteration of land and sea through the works of Australian authors and through their own experiences. The littoral zone is the starting point in this fresh approach to reading literature organised around the natural environment—rainforest, desert, mountains, coast, islands, Antarctica. There’s the beach, where sexual and spiritual crises occur; the Western Australian wheatbelt; deserts, camel trekking, and the transformation of a salt flat into an inland island; New Age literature that ‘appropriates’ Aboriginal culture as the healing poulti...
This book addresses the role and potential of literature in the process of contesting and re-evaluating concepts of nature and animality, describing one’s individual environment as the starting point for such negotiations. It employs the notion of the ‘literary event’ to discuss the specific literary quality of verbal art conceptualised as EnvironMentality. EnvironMentality is grounded on the understanding that fiction does not explain or second scientific and philosophical notions but that it poses a fundamental challenge to any form of knowledge manifesting in processes determined by the human capacity to think beyond a given hermeneutic situation. Bartosch foregrounds the dialectics of understanding the other by means of literary interpretation in ecocritical readings of novels by Amitav Ghosh, Zakes Mda, Yann Martel, Margaret Atwood and J.M. Coetzee, arguing that EnvironMentality helps us as readers of fiction to learn from the books we read that which can only be learned by means of reading: to “think like a mountain” (Aldo Leopold) and to know “what it is like to be a bat” (Thomas Nagel).
Space has emerged in recent years as a radical category in a range of related disciplines across the humanities. Of the many possible applications of this new interest, some of the most exciting and challenging have addressed the issue of domestic architecture and its function as a space for both the dramatisation and the negotiation of a cluster of highly salient issues concerning, amongst other things, belonging and exclusion, fear and desire, identity and difference. Our House is a cross-disciplinary collection of essays taking as its focus both the prospect and the possibility of ‘the house’. This latter term is taken in its broadest possible resonance, encompassing everything from t...
The relationship between Nazism and occultism has been an object of fascination and speculation for decades. Peter Staudenmaier’s Between Occultism and Nazism provides a detailed historical examination centered on the anthroposophist movement founded by Rudolf Steiner. Its surprising findings reveal a remarkable level of Nazi support for Waldorf schools, biodynamic farming, and other anthroposophist initiatives, even as Nazi officials attempted to suppress occult tendencies. The book also includes an analysis of anthroposophist involvement in the racial policies of Fascist Italy. Based on extensive archival research, this study offers rich material on controversial questions about the nature of esoteric spirituality and alternative cultural ideals and their political resonance.