The Environmental Tradition In English Literature

Download or read book The Environmental Tradition in English Literature written by John Parham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing upon the English literary tradition for new perspectives and paradigms, this collection presents a broad range of theoretical and historical approaches to ecocriticism. The first section of the volume offers different theoretical frameworks for ecocritical work, encompassing a range of socio-political, post-modern and multi-disciplinary approaches. In the second section, contributors explore the ways in which ecocriticism allows us to re-think literary history.

Download or read book The Environmental Imagination written by Lawrence Buell and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-01 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the environmental crisis comes a crisis of the imagination, a need to find new ways to understand nature and humanity's relation to it. This is the challenge Lawrence Buell takes up in The Environmental Imagination, the most ambitious study to date of how literature represents the natural environment. With Thoreau's Walden as a touchstone, Buell gives us a far-reaching 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 major new understanding of Thoreau's achievement and, at the same time, a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature. The green tradition in American writing commands Buell's special attention, particularly environmental nonfiction from colonial times to the present. In works by writers from Crevecoeur to Wendell Berry, John Muir to Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson to Leslie Silko, Mary Austin to Edward Abbey, he examines enduring environmental themes such as the dream of relinquishment, the personification of the nonhuman, an attentiveness to environmental cycles, a devotion to place, and a prophetic awareness of possible ecocatastrophe. At the center of this study we find an image of Walden as a quest for greater environmental awareness, an impetus and guide for Buell as he develops a new vision of environmental writing and seeks a new way of conceiving the relation between human imagination and environmental actuality in the age of industrialization. Intricate and challenging in its arguments, yet engagingly and elegantly written, The Environmental Imagination is a major work of scholarship, one that establishes a new basis for reading American nature writing.

Download or read book Romantic Ecology (Routledge Revivals) written by Jonathan Bate and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In identifying Wordsworth's interest in nature as a vital, ecological interest, and linking it with the ecological debate in political history, this study attempts to define the politics of poetry. Wordsworth is portrayed as the guide to a pastoral consciousness.

Download or read book Arcadian America written by Aaron Sachs and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 710 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps America's best environmental idea was not the national park but the garden cemetery, a use of space that quickly gained popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. Such spaces of repose brought key elements of the countryside into rapidly expanding cities, making nature accessible to all and serving to remind visitors of the natural cycles of life. In this unique interdisciplinary blend of historical narrative, cultural criticism, and poignant memoir, Aaron Sachs argues that American cemeteries embody a forgotten landscape tradition that has much to teach us in our current moment of environmental crisis. Until the trauma of the Civil War, many Americans sought to shape society into what they thought of as an Arcadia--not an Eden where fruit simply fell off the tree, but a public garden that depended on an ethic of communal care, and whose sense of beauty and repose related directly to an acknowledgement of mortality and limitation. Sachs explores the notion of Arcadia in the works of nineteenth-century nature writers, novelists, painters, horticulturists, landscape architects, and city planners, and holds up for comparison the twenty-first century's--and his own--tendency toward denial of both death and environmental limits. His far-reaching insights suggest new possibilities for the environmental movement today and new ways of understanding American history.

Download or read book The Ecocriticism Reader written by Cheryll Glotfelty and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Black on Earth written by Kimberly N. Ruffin and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American environmental literature has relied heavily on the perspectives of European Americans, often ignoring other groups. In Black on Earth, Kimberly Ruffin expands the reach of ecocriticism by analyzing the ecological experiences, conceptions, and desires seen in African American writing. Ruffin identifies a theory of "ecological burden and beauty" in which African American authors underscore the ecological burdens of living within human hierarchies in the social order just as they explore the ecological beauty of being a part of the natural order. Blacks were ecological agents before the emergence of American nature writing, argues Ruffin, and their perspectives are critical to understanding the full scope of ecological thought. Ruffin examines African American ecological insights from the antebellum era to the twenty-first century, considering WPA slave narratives, neo-slave poetry, novels, essays, and documentary films, by such artists as Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, Henry Dumas, Percival Everett, Spike Lee, and Jayne Cortez. Identifying themes of work, slavery, religion, mythology, music, and citizenship, Black on Earth highlights the ways in which African American writers are visionary ecological artists.

Download or read book Cultivation and Catastrophe written by Sonya Posmentier and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART 1: CULTIVATION -- 1 Cultivating the New Negro: The Provision Ground in New York -- 2 Cultivating the Nation: The Reterritorialization of Black Poetry at Midcentury -- 3 Cultivating the Caribbean: "The Star-Apple Kingdom," Property, and the Plantation -- PART 2: CATASTROPHE -- 4 Continuing Catastrophe: The Flood Blues of Sterling Brown and Bessie Smith -- 5 Collecting Catastrophe: How the Hurricane Roars in Zora Neale Hurston's -- 6 Collecting Culture: Hurricane Gilbert's Lyric Archive -- Coda: Unnatural Catastrophe -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z