Decolonial Animal Ethics in Linda Hogan’s Poetry and Prose

Decolonial Animal Ethics in Linda Hogan’s Poetry and Prose
Author: Małgorzata Poks
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2023-07-28
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 100091285X

Decolonial Animal Ethics in Linda Hogan’s Poetry and Prose is a plea for an urgent redefinition of human-animal relations on the basis of a nonanthropocentric animal ethic embraced by premodern Indigenous communities but depreciated by coloniality. Without decolonial revisions of animal subjectivity and personhood, the animal genocide can never truly stop. It is also a close reading of Linda Hogan’s poetry and prose in search of the coordinates of a decolonized animal ethic which would foster interspecies becoming. Having defined the recurring tropes, motifs, and attitudes that underpin Hogan’s treatment of nonhuman animals, the book moves on to trace the way she depicts the human-animal bond, especially in the face of the destructive anthropogenic impact. The major questions guiding the analysis of Hogan’s oevre are as follows: who are the animals we share our earthly lives with; what can they teach us about ourselves; how can animals guide us toward more sustainable futures; and what are the conditions of possibility of an interspecies, human-animal thriving. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Indigenous Studies, Decolonial Studies, Animal Studies, Ecocriticism, Anthropocene Studies, as well as readers of Linda Hogan’s literary works.

Reading Madeleine L’Engle

Reading Madeleine L’Engle
Author: Heidi A. Lawrence
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2023-10-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100098785X

Using a critical lens derived from ecopsychology and its praxis, ecotherapy, this book explores the relationships Madeleine L’Engle develops for her characters in a selection of the novels from her three Time, Austin family, and O’Keefe family series as those relationships develop along a human-nonhuman kinship continuum. This is accomplished through an examination both of pairs of novels from the fantastic and the realistic series, and of single novels which stand out as slightly different from the most prominent genre in a given series. Thus, this examination also shows L’Engle’s fluid movement along a fantasy-reality continuum and demonstrates the integration of the three series with each other. Importantly, through examining these relationships and this movement along continuums in these novels, the project demonstrates how ecopsychology and ecotherapy provide strong and important – and as-yet virtually unexplored – intersections with children’s literature.

Water Stories in the Anthropocene

Water Stories in the Anthropocene
Author: Angelo Monaco
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2024-10-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040157661

Water Stories in the Anthropocene explores how climate change has emerged as a major theme in our daily lives as it poses a myriad of economic, scientific, political and cultural challenges in the age of the Anthropocene. In all its forms and manifestations, climate change is primarily a water crisis. Water scarcity, droughts, floods, deluge, rising sea levels, ice melting, wetlands loss and sea pollution are among the main threats posed by climate change, wreaking havoc on both human and nonhuman forms of life. This book engages with instances of extreme events related to water (droughts, floods, deluges) and the impact of climate change on some waterbodies (seas and wetlands) in contemporary Anglophone novels. By taking into account a corpus of novels ranging from the various areas of the Anglophone world, and thus shuttling between the Global North and the Global South, the book reads these novels as "water stories." This volume pays attention to the pervasive presence of water in all aspects of our lives, thus showing how narratives can offer insightful accounts of the present water crisis. Alternating between an econarratological perspective, reflections on the Anthropocene and the human/nonhuman imbrications within the blue humanities, the book contributes significantly to the considerations of the imaginative possibilities of these water stories, showing how narratives can offer insightful accounts of the present water crisis.

Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis

Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis
Author: Janet M. Wilson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2024-11-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1040230237

Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis expands postcolonial precarity studies by addressing the current climate crisis and threats to the habitability of the planet from a range of ecocritical and environmental perspectives. The collection uses planetary thought-action praxis that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all forms of life in addressing the socioecological issues facing humanity: accelerating climate change, over-exploitation of natural resources, and the Global North–South divide. With reference to contemporary cultural productions, such praxis seeks to examine the ideas, images, and narratives that either represent or impede potential disasters like the so-called sixth extinction of the planet, that inspire the dismantling of carbon democracies arising in the wake of neoliberalism, and that address rising inequality with precarious conditions in the transition to renewable energy. The different chapters explore literary and visual representations of planetary precarity, identifying crisis-responsive genres and cultural formats, and assessing approaches to environment-re/making that call for repair, recovery and sustainability. In imagining future habitability, they deploy diverse critical frameworks such as queer utopias, zero-waste lifestyles, alternative ecologies, and adaptations to the uninhabitable. The collection tackles problems of global vulnerability and examines precarity as a condition of resilience and resistance through collective actions and solidarities and innovative constructions of the planet’s survival as a shared home. It engages with current postcolonial debates, uses intersectional methodologies, and introduces contemporary literary, visual concepts, and narrative types.

Storying the Ecocatastrophe

Storying the Ecocatastrophe
Author: Helena Duffy
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2024-05-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040025862

How do writers and artists represent the climate catastrophe so that their works stir audiences to political action or at least raise their environmental awareness without, however, appearing didactic? Storying the Ecocatastrophe attempts to answer this question while interrogating the potential of narrative to become a viable political force. The collection of essays achieves this by examining the representational strategies and ideological goals of contemporary cultural productions about climate change. These productions have been created across different genres, such as the traditional novel, dance performance, solarpunk, economic report, collage, and space opera, as well as across different languages and cultures. The volume’s twelve chapters demonstrate that rising temperatures, erratic weather, extinction of species, depletion of resources, and coastal erosion and flooding are an effect of our abusive relationship with nature. They also show that our use of nuclear power, extraction of natural resources and extensive farming, including heavy reliance on pesticides, intersect with intrahuman violence, as fleshed out by heteropatriarchy, racism, (neo)colonialism, and capitalism. They finally argue that human activity has indirectly contributed to other contemporary crises, namely the migrant crisis and the spread of contagious diseases such as Covid-19.

The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction

The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction
Author: Maria Lindgren Leavenworth
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2023-07-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1000915395

The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction explores the ways in which the Arctic is imagined and what function it is made to serve in a selection of speculative fictions: non-mimetic works that start from the implied question "What if?" Spanning slightly more than two centuries of speculative fiction, from the starting point in Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein to contemporary works that engage with the vast ramifications of anthropogenic climate change, analyses demonstrate how Arctic discourses are supported or subverted and how new Arctics are added to the textual tradition. To illuminate wider lines of inquiry informing the way the world is envisioned, humanity’s place and function in it, and more-than-human entanglements, analyses focus on the function of the actual Arctic and how this function impacts and is impacted by speculative elements. With effects of climate change training the global eye on the Arctic, and as debates around future northern cultural, economic and environmental sustainability intensify, there is a need for a deepened understanding of the discourses that have constructed and are constructing the Arctic. A careful mapping and serious consideration of both past and contemporary speculative visions thus illuminate the role the Arctic has played and may come to play in a diverse set of practices and fields.

Desertscapes in the Global South and Beyond

Desertscapes in the Global South and Beyond
Author: Sushila Shekhawat
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2023-09-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100093733X

Embracing a rich diversity of voices, this volume seeks to explore the different facets of Anthropocene naturecultures in the desert biomes of the Global South and beyond. Essays in this collection will articulate issues of desertification, indigeneity and re-inhabitation in narratives that thread together Tibet, China, Australia, India, South Mexico, South Africa and Brazil in all their richness and complexity. Re-imaging the desert figure’s rich biodiversity, this book presents new ways to envision the human relationships to natural ecology and mindful accountability, tracing complex narrative connections and challenging hegemonic norms of its role in the co-construction of identity, affect, and gender. Essays also aim to engage in an intertextual conversation with colonial genres that influence the popular conception of these spaces, moving beyond the usual tropes to forge a topographically informed desert identity and posit a ‘natureculture’ ecosystem based on the interpenetration of landscape, culture, and history. This volume includes literary exploration of environmental injustices, analyzing motifs of deforestation, land degradation, falling crop production, toxic man-made chemicals, and extractivist practices linked to various social and economic stressors and gradients in economic and political power. This diverse volume will provide a significant contribution to desert humanities from the Global South, responding to the pressing problems of the Anthropocene and employing place-based ecocritical frameworks that help us imagine a sustainable way of life.

Power

Power
Author: Linda Hogan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1999-11-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780393319682

During an ominous storm, sixteen-year-old Omishto sees her Aunt Ama kill a panther, an animal considered to be a sacred ancestor of the North American native Taiga people.