Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones: Ecocriticism and the Liminal from “Invisible Man” to “The Walking Dead”
By Lee Rozelle. University of Alabama Press: Tuscaloosa, AL, 2016.
In Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones: Ecocriticism and the Liminal from “Invisible Man” to “The Walking Dead,” Lee Rozelle chronicles the weirdest, ugliest, and most mixed-up characters to appear on the literary scene since World War II—creatures intimately linked to damaged habitats that rise from the muck, not to destroy or rule the world, but to save it. The book asks what happens to ...
Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, Biology and Technology in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry
By Sam Solnick. Routledge: Abingdon; New York, 2016.
Poetry and the Anthropocene asks what it means to write poetry in and about the Anthropocene, the name given to a geological epoch where humans have a global ecological impact. Combining critical approaches such as ecocriticism and posthumanism with close reading and archival research, it argues that the Anthropocene requires poetry and the humanities to find new ways of thinking about unfamiliar spatial and ...
Monstrous Nature: Environment and Horror on the Big Screen
By Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2016.
Godzilla, a traditional natural monster and representation of cinema’s subgenre of natural attack, also provides a cautionary symbol of the dangerous consequences of mistreating the natural world—monstrous nature on the attack. Horror films such as Godzilla invite an exploration of the complexities of a monstrous nature that humanity both creates and embodies.
Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann demonstrate in Monstrous ...
This Human Shape
By Chad Hanson. Northfield, Minnesota: Red Dragonfly Press, 2016.
This new poetry collection by Chad Hanson is populated with interesting characters in the tradition of Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology or Dave Etter’s Sunflower County. The women and men in Hanson’s poems, under the influence of a high plains geography, veer into remarkable transformations and unusual relationships—a dinner date with a waterfall or a spruce tree that goes off to college for instance. Both playful and serious, these poetic vignettes give ...
Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness
By Michael P. Branch. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications/Roost Books (dist. by Penguin Random House), August, 2016.
This book of creative nonfiction explores environmental experience in the context of parenting in western Nevada’s rugged, high-elevation Great Basin Desert. Chapters combine humor, lyricism, natural history, and reflections on raising two young daughters in an extreme desert landscape. A number of chapters in Raising Wild have appeared in magazines that feature environmental literature, including Orion, Ecotone, Slate, Hawk and ...
Romantic Sustainability: Endurance and the Natural World, 1780–1830
Ben P. Robertson, Editor. Lexington Books: Lanham MD, 2015. Contributions by ASLE members Molly Hall, Madison Jones IV, Seth Reno, and William Stroup.
Romantic Sustainability is a collection of sixteen essays that examine the British Romantic era in ecocritical terms. This international collection addresses the works of traditional Romantic writers such as John Keats, Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Samuel Coleridge but also delves into ecocritical topics related to authors added to the canon more ...
Wordsworth and the Green Romantics: Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century
Lisa Ottum and Seth T. Reno, Editors. University of New Hampshire Press: Lebanon, NH, 2016.
Situated at the intersection of ecocriticism, affect studies, and Romantic studies, this collection breaks new ground on the role of emotions in Western environmentalism. Recent scholarship highlights how traffic between Romantic-era literature and science helped to catalyze Green Romanticism. Closer to our own moment, the affective turn reflects similar cross-disciplinary collaboration, as many scholars now see the physiological ...
Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
By Lauret Savoy. Counterpoint Press: Berkeley, CA, 2015.
Trace won the 2016 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. It was also a finalist for the 2016 PEN American Open Book Award, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Listen to a recent public radio interview on “To the Best of Our Knowledge.”
In this powerful and provocative meditation on place, race, and the unvoiced presence of the past, Lauret Savoy ...
Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology
Hubert Zapf, Editor. DE GRUYTER MOUTON: Berlin, April 2016.
The Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology features essays by ASLE members Scott Slovic, Kate Rigby, Hannes Bergthaller, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Alexa Weik von Mossner, Louise Westling, Suzaan Boettger, Catrin Gersdorf, Christa Grewe-Volpp, Nancy Easterlin, Axel Goodbody, Serpil Oppermann, Greg Garrard, Serenella Iovino, Elena Past, and Sylvia Mayer.
Ecocriticism has emerged as one of the most fascinating and rapidly growing fields of recent literary and cultural studies. From its regional origins in ...
My Last Continent
By Midge Raymond. Scribner: New York, NY, 2016.
An unforgettable debut with an irresistible love story, My Last Continent is a big-hearted, propulsive novel set against the dramatic Antarctic landscape.
It is only at the end of the world—among the glacial mountains, cleaving icebergs, and frigid waters of Antarctica—where Deb Gardner and Keller Sullivan feel at home. For the few blissful weeks they spend each year studying the habits of emperor and Adélie penguins, Deb and Keller can escape the frustrations ...