Member Bookshelf

Candice Allmark-Kent. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

Literature, Science, and Animal Advocacy in Canada: Practical Zoocriticism is the first book-length study of animals in Canadian fiction. Using a historical approach, it offers a much-needed alternative to existing models of animals as symbols of Canadian victimhood. Spanning more than a century, the scope of this book includes classic writers, Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G. D. Roberts, as well as popular contemporary authors, such as Barbara Gowdy, Yann Martel, Margaret Atwood, and many others.

By recontextualizing these works ...

Edited by Elizabeth Bradfield, CMarie Fuhrman, and Derek Sheffield. Mountaineers Press, 2023.

Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry is a book that blends art, science, and literature to celebrate the Cascadia region, which stretches from Alaska to Northern California and from the Pacific Ocean to the Continental Divide. The book is organized into 13 bioregions and includes 128 organism profiles, each with a combination of ecological prose, poetry, and black-and-white art. The guide’s organization encourages readers to consider the connections between different beings, rather ...

Paul Huebener. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024.

Sleep, and the lack of it, is a public obsession and an enormous everyday quandary. Troubled sleep tends to be seen as an individual problem and personal responsibility, to be fixed by better habits and tracking gadgets, but the reality is more complicated. Sleep is a site of politics, culture, and power.

In Restless in Sleep Country, Paul Huebener pulls back the covers on cultural representations of sleep to show how they are entangled with contemporary issues. The book ...

By Serpil Oppermann. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

By drawing on oceanography (marine sciences) and limnology (freshwater sciences), social sciences, and the environmental humanities, the field of the blue humanities critically examines the planet’s troubled seas and distressed freshwaters from socio-cultural, literary, historical, aesthetic, ethical, and theoretical perspectives. Since all waterscapes in the Anthropocene are overexploited and endangered sites, the field calls for transdisciplinary cooperation and encourages thinking together beyond the conventions of tentacular anthropocentric thought. Working across many disciplines, the blue humanities, then, challenges ...

By Steve Mentz. Fordham University Press, 2024.

Journey through uncharted literary waters and explore Melville’s epic in bold new light

Come sail with I.

We’re not taking the same trip, though you might recognize the familiar course. This time, the Pequod’s American voyage steers its course across the curvature of the Word Ocean without anyone at the helm. We are leaving one man and his madness on shore. Our ship overflows with glorious plurality—multiracial, visionary, queer, conflicted, polyphonic, playful, violent. But on this voyage something is different. Today ...

By Jessica Carey-Webb. Vanderbilt University Press, 2024.

The Amazon extends across nine countries, encompasses forty percent of South America, and hosts four European languages and more than three hundred Indigenous languages and cultures. Eyes on Amazonia is a fascinating exploration of how Latin American, European, and US intellectuals imagined and represented the Amazon region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This multifaceted study, which draws on a range of literary and nonliterary texts and visual sources, examines the complex ways that race, gender, mobility, ...

By Carolyn Fornoff. Vanderbilt University Press, 2024.

During the twenty-first century, Mexico has escalated extractive concessions at the same time that it has positioned itself as an international leader in the fight against climate change. Cultural production emergent from this contradiction frames this impasse as a crisis of imagination. Subjunctive Aesthetics studies how contemporary writers, filmmakers, and visual artists grapple with the threat that climate change and extractivist policies pose to Mexico’s present and future. It explores how artists rise to the challenge of envisioning alternative ...

Edited by Debra J. Rosenthal. MLA Book Publications, 2024.

Over the past several decades, writers such as Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Octavia E. Butler, and Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner have explored climate change through literature, reflecting current anxieties about humans’ impact on the planet. Emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinarity, this volume embraces literature as a means to cultivate students’ understanding of the ongoing climate crisis, ethics in times of disaster, and the intrinsic intersectionality of environmental issues.

Contributors to Teaching the Literature of Climate Change discuss speculative climate ...

Edited by Debra J. Rosenthal and Jason de Lara Molesky. University of Virginia Press, 2023.

Since its emergence in the late twentieth century, climate fiction—or cli-fi—has concerned itself as much with economic injustice and popular revolt as with rising seas and soaring temperatures. Indeed, with its insistent focus on redressing social disparities, cli-fi might reasonably be classified as a form of protest literature. As environmental crises escalate and inequality intensifies, literary writers and scholars alike have increasingly scrutinized the dual exploitations of the earth’s ...

By William Steffen. Oxford University Press, 2023.

Anthropocene Theater and the Shakespearean Stage revises the anthropocentric narrative of early globalization from the perspective of the non-human world in order to demonstrate Nature’s agency in determining ecological, economic, and colonial outcomes. It welcomes readers to reimagine theater history in broader terms, and to account for more non-human and atmospheric players in the otherwise anthropocentric history of Shakespearean performance. This book analyses plays, horticultural manuals, cosmetic recipes, Puritan polemics, and travel writing in order to demonstrate ...