For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes
By Lowell Duckert. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Recent years have witnessed a surge in early modern ecostudies, many devoted to Shakespearean drama. Yet in this burgeoning discipline, travel writing appears moored in historicization, inorganic subjects are far less prevalent than organic ones, and freshwater sites are hardly visited. For All Waters explores these uncharted wetscapes.
Lowell Duckert shows that when playwrights and travel writers such as Sir Walter Raleigh physically interacted with rivers, glaciers, monsoons, ...
Vulture: The Private Life of an Unloved Bird
By Katie Fallon. UPNE: Lebanon, NH, 2017
Perfectly adapted to its place in nature, the vulture retains its bad reputation. But is it deserved?
Turkey vultures, the most widely distributed and abundant scavenging birds of prey on the planet, are found from central Canada to the southern tip of Argentina, and nearly everywhere in between. In the United States we sometimes call them buzzards; in parts of Mexico the name is aura cabecirroja, in Uruguay jote cabeza colorada, ...
Placing John Haines
By James Perrin Warren. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2017.
John Haines arrived in Alaska, fresh out of the Navy, in 1947 and established a homestead seventy miles southeast of Fairbanks. He stayed there nearly twenty-five years, learning to live off the country: hunting, trapping, fishing, gathering berries, and growing vegetables. Those years formed him as a writer, and the interior of Alaska and its boreal forest influenced his poetry and prose and helped him find his unique voice.
Placing John Haines, the ...
Critical Ecofeminism
By Greta Gaard. Lexington Books: Lanham, MD, 2017.
Australian feminist philosopher Val Plumwood coined the term “critical ecofeminism” to “situate humans in ecological terms and nonhumans in ethical terms,” for “the two tasks are interconnected, and cannot be addressed properly in isolation from each other.” Variously using the terms “critical ecological feminism,” “critical antidualist ecological feminism,” and “critical ecofeminism,” Plumwood’s work developed amid a range of perspectives describing feminist intersections with ecopolitical issues—i.e., toxic production and toxic wastes, indigenous sovereignty, global economic justice, ...
Ibsen Studies
By Amir Hossain. LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, 2017.
Ibsen Studies focuses upon the critical evaluation of Henrik Ibsen and his literary writing in many respects. To write this book, the author selected the three major plays by Ibsen, including A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People. The aim of the author is to investigate the empowerment of women in the light of Ibsen’s attitudes and his critics. In this book, he has tried to highlight the social problems of 19th-century ...
Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene
By Craig Dionne. Punctum Books, 2016.
Approaching King Lear from an eco-materialist perspective, Posthuman Lear examines how the shift in Shakespeare’s tragedy from court to stormy heath activates a different sense of language as tool-being — from that of participating in the flourish of aristocratic prodigality and circumstance, to that of survival and pondering one’s interdependence with a denuded world. Dionne frames the thematic arc of Shakespeare’s tragedy about the fall of a king as a tableaux of ...
Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative
By Alexa Weik von Mossner. Ohio State University Press: Columbus, OH 2017.
Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative explores our emotional engagement with environmental narrative. Focusing on the American cultural context, Alexa Weik von Mossner develops an ecocritical approach that draws on the insights of affective science and cognitive narratology. This approach helps to clarify how we interact with environmental narratives in ways that are both biologically universal and culturally specific. In doing so, it pays particular ...
SENTINELS; a Florida mythos
By Rich McKee. Venice, FL: Brookside Lit, 2017
Riddling eco-fiction collides with literary satire in Sentinels, a tale of two radical environmentalists, Sean McDuff and Jane Kowechobe, who get deeply involved in fringe government efforts to expand Everglades National Park after a catastrophic hurricane flattens and floods much of South Florida. Of course many Sinshine State politicians are opposed to such Green shenanigans, and covertly hire hunters to seek out and kill endangered species in the proposed protected wilderness and wetlands, ...
Hawk on Wire: Ecopoems
By Scott T. Starbuck. Fomite Press: Burlington, VT 2017.
Climate change science and prophecy explored in poetry are themes in Hawk on Wire: Ecopoems with endorsements from notable writers John Shoptaw, John Keeble, Daniela Gioseffi, Anne Elvey, Simmons B. Buntin, Gail Entrekin, Michael Spring, Thomas Rain Crowe, Teresa Mei Chuc, Senior Research Scientist at IPAC Caltech Yun Wang, Prartho Sereno, Eric Magrane, and Daniel Hudon. The book is a record of ecological disaster caused by global heating, and informed prophecy of ...
Nature’s Temples: The Complex World of Old-Growth Forests
By Joan Maloof. Portland, Oregon: Timber Press, 2016.
“An old-growth forest is one that has formed naturally over a long period of time with little or no disturbance from humankind. They are increasingly rare and largely misunderstood. In Nature’s Temples, Joan Maloof, the director of the Old-Growth Forest Network, makes a heartfelt and passionate case for their importance. This evocative and accessible narrative defines old-growth and provides a brief history of forests. It offers a rare view ...