In Imagining Nature Kevin Hutchings combines insights garnered from literary history, poststructuralist theory, and the emerging field of ecological literary studies. He considers William Blake's illuminated poetry in the context of the eighteenth-century model of "nature's economy,' a conceptual paradigm that prefigured modern-day ecological insights, describing all earthly entities as integrated parts of a dynamic, interactive system. Hutchings details Blake's sympathy for – and important suspicions concerning – the burgeoning contemporary fascination with such things as environmental ethics, animal rights, and the various fields of scientific naturalism. By focusing on Blake's concern for the relationship between nature and ideology (including the politics of class, gender, and religion) Hutchings avoids the sentimentalism and misanthropic pitfalls all too often associated with environmental commentary. He articulates a distinctively Blakean perspective on current debates in literary theory and eco-criticism and argues that while Blake's peculiar humanism and profound emphasis upon spiritual concerns have led the majority of his readers to regard his work as patently anti-natural, such a view distorts the central political and aesthetic concerns of Blake's corpus. By showing that Blake's apparent hostility toward the natural world is actually a key aspect of his famous critique of institutionalized authority, Hutchings presents Blake's work as an example of "green Romanticism" in its most sophisticated and socially responsive form.

"This book makes an innovative exploration into some of the implications and lacunae associated with the recent push by many social scientists to "denaturalise nature". The contributors to this volume describe the diverse forms which the dialectic between nature as 'fact' and nature as 'imagined' may take, and they show how this seeming dichotomy is a constantly shifting whole".--BOOKJACKET.

This landmark work explores how our attitudes toward nature are mirrored in and influenced by poetry. Showing us a resurgent vision of harmony between nature and humanity in the work of some of our most widely read poets, Imagining the Earth reveals the power of poetry to identify, interpret, and celebrate a wide range of issues related to nature and our place in it.

"Picturing Tropical Nature reflects on the work of several nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists and artists, including Alexander von Humboldt, Alfred Russel Wallace, Louis Agassiz, Sir Patrick Manson, and Margaret Mee. Their careers illuminate several aspects of tropicalization: science and art in the making of tropical pictures; the commercial and cultural boom in things tropical in the modern period; photographic attempts to represent tropical hybrid races; antitropicalism and its role in an emerging environmentalist sensibility; and visual depictions of disease in the new tropical medicine."--Jacket.

"A thoughtful treatise on how popular representations of nature, through entertainment and tourism, shape how we imagine environmental problems and their solutions"--Provided by publisher.

With Thoreau’s Walden as a touchstone, Buell offers an account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of Western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more “ecocentric” way of being. In doing so, he provides a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature.

We are currently facing the sixth mass extinction of species in the history of life on Earth, biologists claim—the first one caused by humans. Heise argues that understanding these stories and symbols is indispensable for any effective advocacy on behalf of endangered species. More than that, she shows how biodiversity conservation, even and especially in its scientific and legal dimensions, is shaped by cultural assumptions about what is valuable in nature and what is not.

Reimagining Nature is a new introduction to the fast developing area of natural theology, written by one of the world’s leading theologians. The text engages in serious theological dialogue whilst looking at how past developments might illuminate and inform theory and practice in the present. This text sets out to explore what a properly Christian approach to natural theology might look like and how this relates to alternative interpretations of our experience of the natural world Alister McGrath is ideally placed to write the book as one of the world’s best known theologians and a chief proponent of natural theology This new work offers an account of the development of natural theology throughout history and informs of its likely contribution in the present This feeds in current debates about the relationship between science and religion, and religion and the humanities Engages in serious theological dialogue, primarily with Augustine, Aquinas, Barth and Brunner, and includes the work of natural scientists, philosophers of science, and poets

“Engineering” has firmly taken root in the entangled bank of biology even as proposals to remake the living world have sent tendrils in every direction, and at every scale. Nature Remade explores these complex prospects from a resolutely historical approach, tracing cases across the decades of the long twentieth century. These essays span the many levels at which life has been engineered: molecule, cell, organism, population, ecosystem, and planet. From the cloning of agricultural crops and the artificial feeding of silkworms to biomimicry, genetic engineering, and terraforming, Nature Remade affirms the centrality of engineering in its various forms for understanding and imagining modern life. Organized around three themes—control and reproduction, knowing as making, and envisioning—the chapters in Nature Remade chart different means, scales, and consequences of intervening and reimagining nature.