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Indian ecocriticism has not yet adequately demonstrated the applicability of ecological/deep ecological/tinai principles to visual texts. Culture and Media: Ecocritical Explorations closes this gap at the most opportune moment. Though this volume accommodates ecologically oriented interpretations from several cultures across the world, it reserves the centre stage for Indian ecocriticism and ecotheory quite appropriately. The volume effectively challenges the major documents on ecocriticism and theory (published by international presses), which have been reluctant to give space to tinai criticism and theory that transcend Dravidian or Tamil boundaries. The day is not far when cinema of the world, shaped by tinai theory, will employ tinai hermeneutics to gain fresh insight, which, in turn, will feed into the processes of creation and production of relevant and great movies.
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This book is the first study to tackle the relationship between landscape and religion in-depth. Author Matthias Egeler overviews previous theories of the relationship between landscape and religion and then pushes this theorizing further with a rich case study: the supernatural landscape of the Icelandic Westfjords. There, religion and the supernatural--from churches to elf hills--are ubiquitous in the landscape and, as Egeler shows, this example sheds entirely new light on core aspects of the relationship between landscape, religion, and the supernatural.
Throughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential difference—rather than a porous transition—between the human and animal. Attempts to assign essential properties to humans (e.g., language, reason, or morality) often reflected ulterior aims to defend a privileged position for humans.. This book shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the questions “What is human?” and “What is animal?” What makes this collection unique is that it fills a lacuna in critical animal studies and the growing field of ecocriticism. It is the first collection that establishes a productive encounter between philosophical perspectives on the human–animal boundary and those that draw on fictional literature. The objective is to establish a dialogue between those disciplines with the goal of expanding the imaginative scope of human-animal relationships. The contributions thus do not only trace and deconstruct the boundaries dividing humans and nonhuman animals, they also present the reader with alternative perspectives on the porous continuum and surprising reversal of what appears as human and what as nonhuman.
Nature and Literary Studies supplies a broad and accessible overview of one of the most important and contested keywords in modern literary studies. Drawing together the work of leading scholars of a variety of critical approaches, historical periods, and cultural traditions, the book examines nature's philosophical, theological, and scientific origins in literature, as well as how literary representations of this concept evolved in response to colonialism, industrialization, and new forms of scientific knowledge. Surveying nature's diverse applications in twenty-first-century literary studies and critical theory, the volume seeks to reconcile nature's ideological baggage with its fundamental role in fostering appreciation of nonhuman being and agency. Including chapters on wilderness, pastoral, gender studies, critical race theory, and digital literature, the book is a key resource for students and professors seeking to understand nature's role in the environmental humanities.
Symbols and tropes of liquidity have long been connected to notions of the feminine and, therefore, with orthodox constructions of femininity and womanhood. Underpinning these ideas is the vital importance of water as life force, which has given it a central place in cultural vocabularies worldwide. These symbolic economies, in turn, inform the discourses through which positive or negative associations of women with water come to bear impact on the social positioning of female gendered identities. Women and Water in Global Fiction brings together an array of studies of this phenomenon as seen in writing by and about women from around the world. The literature explored in this volume works to...
Nuclear Cultures: Irradiated Subjects, Aesthetics and Planetary Precarity aims to develop the field of nuclear humanities and the powerful ability of literary and cultural representations of science and catastrophe to shape the meaning of historic events. Examining multiple discourses and textual materials, including fiction, poetry, biographies, comics, paintings, documentary and photography, this volume will illuminate the cultural, ecological and social impact of nuclearization narratives. Furthermore, this text explores themes such as the cultures of atomic scientists, the making of the bomb, nuclear bombings and disasters, nuclear aesthetics and art, and the global mobilization against nuclearization. Nuclear Cultures breaks new ground in the debates on "the nuclear" to foster the development of nuclear humanities, its vocabulary and methodology.
This volume is a collection of ten essays that direct their gaze to the unfolding of contagions in the non-classical contexts of Asia and Africa. Or, to borrow from the title of one of Partha Chatterjee’s books, they are reflections on the pandemic in most of the world. Featuring many scholars (of the humanities and social sciences) in the Global South, these chapters take as their intellectual focus the political-social as well as the ethical challenges posed by the contagions in the "East." Through analyses of literary narratives/films/video games, this Contagion Narratives traces the manufactured narratives of victimization by majority-communities and the lethal divides consequently bei...
The first to focus on the (re-)presentations of oil in dramatic literature, theatre, and performance, Oil and Modern World Dramas is a pioneering volume in the emerging field of Oil Literatures and Cultures, and the more established field of World Literatures. Through close analysis, Fakhrkonandeh demonstrates how these dramatic works depict oil, both in its perceived nature and character, as an overdetermined matter/sign/object: a symbol (of freedom, autonomy, speed, wealth, modernity, enlightenment), a commodity, a social-cultural agent, a social relation, and a hyper-object. This book is also distinguished by its innovative and critically manifold conceptual framework, positing the petro-...
Cinematic Landscape and Emerging Identities in Contemporary Latin American Film offers a series of perspectives, produced from a diverse array of aesthetic and theoretical approaches, that build on previous studies about cinematic landscape and space while addressing it from a regional perspective. This book explores how contemporary Latin American filmmakers have included, created, or transformed different types of landscapes in their works. The chapters highlight the centrality of landscape as a meaningful space in film, composed in addition to the image, sound, and movement. The core of the edited collection revolves around films where landscape emerges as a crucial element to transmit the urgency of issues affecting diverse Latin American societies. The representation of emerging social actors, such as Indigenous groups, Afro-Latin Americans, LGBTQIA+ communities, migrants, environmentalists, and women, offers a localized view of sociocultural, political, and environmental challenges from marginalized and dissenting voices.