By approaching geography and history through an integrated eco-feminist and psychogeography lens, Connecting World Geography to World History Through Storytelling, Eco-feminism, and Mindfulness reaches toward a fresh exploration of the land and water while offering suggestions for content-based social-emotional learning activities that include ethnogeography exercises and mindfulness activities.

'Finalist' in the PROSE Award (2022) for Language & Linguistics Awarded Honors at the Storytelling World Awards 2022 Linking the ongoing ecological crisis with contemporary conditions of alienation and disenchantment in modern society, this book investigates the capacity of oral storytelling to reconnect people to the natural world and enchant and renew their experience of nature, place and their own existence in the world. Anthony Nanson offers an in-depth examination of how a diverse ecosystem of oral stories and the dynamics of storytelling as an activity can catalyse different kinds of conversation and motivation, helping us resist the discourse of powerful vested interests. Detailed analysis of traditional, true-life and fictional stories shows how spoken narrative language can imbue landscapes, creatures and experiences with enchantment and mediate between the inner world of consciousness and outer world of ecology and community. A pioneering ecolinguistic and ecocritical study of oral storytelling in the modern world, Storytelling and Ecology offers insight into the ways that sharing stories in each other's embodied presence can open up spaces for transformation in our relationships with the ecological world around us.

This work throws light on the areas of space and time, nature and culture, spirit and matter in the folktales that nurture systemic thinking. It identifies and explores motifs and patterns in select folktales that promote interconnectedness, interdependence, holism, synthesis, and circular pattern of life and examines the ecological relevance of folktales in fostering a systematic view of life. The volume discusses why it is important to critically analyze alternative worldviews in order to find holistic solutions to contemporary global ecological issues. It sheds light upon Ecofemiotics as a discipline, a portmanteau of Ecofeminist Semiotics, and through a re-reading of folktales, it puts forward an innovative folktale typology which connects women with environment. The book discusses an ecofemiotics cyclical praxis at three levels, • Promoting theory to practice through the analysis of folktales as Gaia Care Narratives using the Ecofemiotic framework. • Enabling practice to theory, through a classroom experiment, observation, and inference. • Envisioning theory to practice, through the identification of Gaia Care Principles and its multidisciplinary hands-on scope and function to create avenues towards ecological balance and sustainable living. Inspired by the hearts that tell stories of love, care, nurture, and the Earth, this nuanced work will be of interest to students and researchers of literature and literary theory, sociology, social anthropology, gender studies and women’s studies, feminism, development studies, environment, and folklore studies.

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.

A broad examination of climate fantasy and science fiction, from The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia series to The Handmaid’s Tale and Game of Thrones. Fellow Inklings J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis may have belonged to different branches of Christianity, but they both made use of a faith-based environmentalist ethic to counter the mid-twentieth-century’s triple threats of fascism, utilitarianism, and industrial capitalism. In Fire and Snow, Marc DiPaolo explores how the apocalyptic fantasy tropes and Christian environmental ethics of the Middle-earth and Narnia sagas have been adapted by a variety of recent writers and filmmakers of “climate fiction,” a growing literary and cinematic genre that grapples with the real-world concerns of climate change, endless wars, and fascism, as well as the role religion plays in easing or escalating these apocalyptic-level crises. Among the many other well-known climate fiction narratives examined in these pages are Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, The Handmaid’s Tale, Mad Max, and Doctor Who. Although the authors of these works stake out ideological territory that differs from Tolkien’s and Lewis’s, DiPaolo argues that they nevertheless mirror their predecessors’ ecological concerns. The Christians, Jews, atheists, and agnostics who penned these works agree that we all need to put aside our cultural differences and transcend our personal, socioeconomic circumstances to work together to save the environment. Taken together, these works of climate fiction model various ways in which a deep ecological solidarity might be achieved across a broad ideological and cultural spectrum. “This book is remarkably diverse in its literary, cinematic, journalistic, and graphics-media sources, and the writing is equally authoritative in all these domains. DiPaolo’s prose moves deftly from a work of fiction to its film avatar, to the political and societal realities they address, and back again into other cultural manifestations and then into and out of the deep theory of climate fiction, literary scholarship, ecofeminism, religious tradition, and authorial biographies. It contributes considerably to all of these fields, and is indispensable for climate and environmental literature classes. It’s also a must-have for general readers of the genre.” — Jonathan Evans, coauthor of Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J. R .R. Tolkien “I like it. No, I love it. This book is both broad and deep, and yet it remains both very readable and constantly interesting. It’s the sort of book that can only be written by someone who is a good reader of both books and culture. As I was reading it I thought, this is like being at a party and meeting someone brilliant and fun, and finding that I’m enjoying that person’s company so much that I don’t notice the time flying by. It’s not often that a scholarly book does that to me.” — David O’Hara, Augustana University

Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth tackles the reenchantment process at work in a part of contemporary ecoliterature that is marked by the resurfacing of the song of the earth topos and of Gaia images. Focusing on the postmodernist braiding of various indigenous and ecofeminist ontologies, close readings of the animistic and totemic dimensions of the stories at hand lead to the theorizing of liminal realism—a mode that shares much with magical realism but that is approached through an ecopoetic lens, specifically working an interspecies kind of magic, situating readers in-between human and other-than-human worlds. This book promotes a worldview based on relationships of reciprocity and symbiosis. It restores our capacity for wonder together with our sensitive intelligence. Liminal realism adopts a stance in-between scientific, mythical, and poetic worldviews as it calls attention to the soundscapes, odorscapes, feelscapes, and landscapes of the world. This monograph offers an original transdisciplinary and cross-Atlantic take on ecopoetics as it straddles the two academic worlds and sparks a conversation between artworks, theories, and studies emerging from the English-speaking world as well as from Francophone contexts. Entangling the materiality of language back within the flesh of the world, this book and the texts under study provide insight into the fundamentally sympoietic dimension of ecopoiesis.

This monograph aims to counter the assumption that the anti-tale is a ‘subversive twin’ or dark side of the fairy tale coin, instead it argues that the anti-tale is a genre rich in complexity and radical potential that fundamentally challenges the damaging ideologies and socializing influence of fairy tales. The Feminist Architecture of Postmodern Anti-Tales: Space, Time and Bodies highlights how anti-tales take up timely debates about revising old structures, opening our minds up to a broader spectrum of experience or ways of viewing the world and its inhabitants. They show us alternative architectures for the future by deconstructing established spatio-temporal laws and structures, as well as limited ideas surrounding the body, and ultimately liberate us from the shackles of a single-minded and simplistic masculine reality currently upheld by dominant social forces and patriarchal fairy tales themselves. It is only when these masculine fairy tales and social architectures are deconstructed that new, more inclusive feminine realities and futures can be brought into being.

Departing Radically in Academic Writing (DRAW) seeks to show qualitative researchers that there are ways to embrace creatively alternative approaches to writing, whilst fulfilling the demands of an academic tenure system. Putting forward playful, arts-based and creative writing/fiction approaches to writing up research, the contributions in this book demonstrate how theorisation can happen in different ways, particularly, for younger career scholars struggling with their thesis submissions. Some of the contributions in the book come from those who have successfully defended a "DRAWn" thesis. Whilst this is not a handbook or "how to", it does show DRAW and radical departure work can work in practice without disadvantaging the researcher. Each chapter includes Author's Notes on the chapter and Radical Writing Prompts to stimulate creative thinking. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, Ruth Behar, bell hooks, Helene Cixous, Virginia Woolf, Laurel Richardson and other literary and creative feminist, qualitative thinkers, Departing Radically in Academic Writing will appeal to graduate students and researchers in Education, the social sciences and humanities who are interested to advance critical thinking through radically departured work.

“An emotional masterpiece . . . A novel in which humor, passion, and superb prose conspire to seize a reader by the heart and by the soul.” —New York Daily News From Barbara Kingsolver, the acclaimed author of Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Bean Trees, and other modern classics, Animal Dreams is a passionate and complex novel about love, forgiveness, and one woman’s struggle to find her place in the world "Animals dream about the things they do in the daytime just like people do. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life." So says Loyd Peregrina, a handsome Apache trainman and latter-day philosopher. But when Codi Noline returns to her hometown, Loyd's advice is painfully out of her reach. Dreamless and at the end of her rope, Codi comes back to Grace, Arizona, to confront her past and face her ailing, distant father. What she finds is a town threatened by a silent environmental catastrophe, some startling clues to her own identity, and a man whose view of the world could change the course of her life. Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American legends, Animal Dreams is a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's largest commitments. This edition includes a P.S. section with additional insights from Barbara Kingsolver, background material, suggestions for further reading, and more.