After uncovering the oppressive dichotomies of male/female and nature/culture that underlie contemporary environmental problems, Feminist Ecocriticism focuses specifically on emancipatory strategies employed by ecofeminist literary critics as antidotes, asking what our lives might be like as those strategies become increasingly successful in overcoming oppression. Thus, ecofeminism is not limited to the critique of literature, but also helps identify and articulate liberatory ideals that can be actualized in the real world, in the process transforming everyday life. Providing an alternative to rugged individualism, for example, ecofeminist literature promotes a more fulfilling sense of interrelationship with both community and the land. In the process of exploring literature from ecofeminist perspectives, the book reveals strategies of emancipation that have already begun to give rise to more hopeful ecological narratives.

Eco-Critical Literature: Regreening African Landscapescritically examines the representations, constructions, and imaginings of the relationship between the human and non-human worlds in contemporary African literature and culture. It offers innovative, incisive, and critical perspectives on the importance of sustaining a symbiotic relationship between humans and their environment. The book thus carries African scholarship beyond the mere analysis of themes and style to ethical and activist roles of literature having an impact on readers and the public. It is a scholarship geared towards rectifying ecological imbalance that is prevalent in many parts of the continent that forms the setting, context, and thematic discourse of the works or authors studied in this book. Besides sensitizing the African readership to the need for the restoration of harmony between man and the environment, this book equally aims to further familiarize scholars and students working on African literature and culture with the theoretical concerns of eco-criticism.

WINNER of the 2018 4-11 Picture Book Awards (Fiction 4-7 category)One of the New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2017All I want to do on a rainy day like today is play my game, but my mum says it's a waste of time. The game drives my mum mad. She takes it away. I take it back. I wish Dad had come with us on this rainy, grey weekend. Without my game, nothing is fun. On the other hand, maybe I'm wrong about that...

This book is the first collection of its kind, an anthology of classic and cutting-edge writings in the rapidly emerging field of literary ecology. Exploring the relationship between literature and the physical environment, literary ecology is the study of the ways that writing - from novels and folktales to U.S. government reports and corporate advertisements - both reflects and influences our interactions with the natural world.

Table of contents

In Ecocritical Explorations, Patrick D. Murphy explores environmental literature and environmental cultural issues through both theoretical and applied criticism. He engages with the concepts of referentiality, simplicity, the nation state, and virtual reality in the first section of the book, and then goes on to interrogate these issues in contemporary environmental literature, both American and international. He concludes his argument with a discussion of the larger frames of family dynamics and un-natural disasters, such as hurricanes and global warming, ending with a chapter on the integration of scholarship and pedagogy in the classroom, with reference to his own teaching experiences. Murphy's study provides a wide ranging discussion of contemporary literature and cultural phenomena through the lens of ecological literary criticism, giving attention to both theoretical issues and applied critiques. In particular, he looks at popular literary genres, such as mystery and science fiction, as well as actual disasters and disaster scenarios. Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies is a timely contribution to ecological literary criticism and an insightful look into how we represent our relationship with the environment.

Focusing on ecocritical aspects throughout Chinese literature, particularly modern and contemporary Chinese literature, the contributors to this book examine the environmental and ecological dimensions of notions such as qing (情) and jing (境). Chinese modern and contemporary environmental writing offers a unique aesthetic perspective toward the natural world. Such a perspective is mainly ecological and allows human subjects to take a benign and nonutilitarian attitude toward nature. The contributors to this book demonstrate how Chinese literary ecology tends toward an ecological-systemic holism from which all human behaviors should be closely examined. They do so by examining a range of writers and genres, including Liu Cixin’s science fiction, Wu Ming-yi’s environmental fiction, and Zhang Chengzhi’s historical narratives. This book provides valuable insights for scholars and students looking to understand how Chinese literature conceptualizes the relationship between humanity and nature, as well as our role and position within the natural realm.

Together, their work signals a new direction in the field and offers refreshingly original insights into a broad spectrum of texts.

The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism explores a range of critical perspectives used to analyze literature, film, and the visual arts in relation to the natural environment. Since the publication of field-defining works by Lawrence Buell, Jonathan Bate, and Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm in the 1990s, ecocriticism has become a conventional paradigm for critical analysis alongside queer theory, deconstruction, and postcolonial studies. The field includes numerous approaches, genres, movements, and media, as the essays collected here demonstrate. The contributors come from around the globe and, similarly, the literature and media covered originate from several countries and continents. Taken together, the essays consider how literary and other cultural productions have engaged with the natural environment to investigate climate change, environmental justice, sustainability, the nature of "humanity," and more. Featuring thirty-four original chapters, the volume is organized into three major areas. The first, History, addresses topics such as the Renaissance pastoral, Romantic poetry, the modernist novel, and postmodern transgenic art. The second, Theory, considers how traditional critical theories have expanded to include environmental perspectives. Included in this section are essays on queer theory, science studies, deconstruction, and postcolonialism. Genre, the final major section, explores the specific artforms that have animated the field over the past decade, including nature writing, children's literature, animated films, and digital media. A short section entitled Views from Here concludes the handbook by zeroing in on the various transnational perspectives informing the continued dissemination and globalization of the field.

This book offers a brief, incisive accessible overview of the fast-changing field of environmental literary criticism in an age of global environmental threat.