Featuring contributions from key names in the field alongside some of the most exciting new voices, this collection presents cutting-edge work on species extinction from a wide variety of perspectives across the environmental humanities.Biodiversity loss threatens to transform the ecological foundations of all biological life on the planet, yet solutions to this crisis are fiercely contested. This book addresses extinction – along with climate change, the most urge...

This Element presents a necessary intervention within the rapidly expanding field of research in the environmental humanities on climate change and environmental literacy. In contrast to the dominant, science-centred literacy debates, which largely ignore the unique resources of the humanities, it asks: How does literary reading contribute to climate change communication? How does this contribution relate to recent demands for environmental and related literacies? Rather than reducing the ...

This book introduces the notion of "educational ecology" as a necessary and promising pedagogic principle for the teaching of Anglophone literatures and cultures in a time of climate change. Drawing on scholarship in the environmental humanities and practice-oriented research in education and literature pedagogy, chapters address the challenges of climate change and the demand for sustainability and environmental pedagogy from the specific perspective of literary and cultural studies and e...

Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change: Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology asks two questions: How do we read (in) the Anthropocene? And what can reading teach us? To answer these questions, the book develops a concept of transcultural ecology that understands fiction and interpretation as text models that help address the various and incommensurable scales inherent to climate change. Focussing on text composition, reception, storyworlds, and narrative framing in world lite...

Although current environmental debates lay the focus on the Industrial Revolution as a sociopolitical development that has led to the current environmental crisis, many ecocritical projects have avoided historicizing their concepts or have been characterized by approaches that were either pre-historic or post-historic: while the environmental movement has harbored the dream of restoring nature to a state untouched by human hands, there is also the pessimistic vision of a post-apocalyptic w...

The essays in this collection seek to bring together current developments in ecocriticism and the pedagogical practice of teaching English at all levels, from primary schools to Higher Education. They cover theoretical and practical discussions of the nexus between the sciences and the humanities and maintain that the notion of the two cultures be refused for good, they argue for the inclusion of particular texts or theoretical perspectives, and they suggest ways to teaching environments o...

This volume explores the potential of the concept of the creaturely for thinking and writing beyond the idea of a clear-cut human-animal divide, presenting innovative perspectives and narratives for an age which increasingly confronts us with the profound ecological, ethical and political challenges of a multispecies world. The text explores written work such as Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho and Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, video media such as the film "Creature...

From Plato to Freud to ecocriticism, the book illustrates dozens of stimulating-and sometimes notoriously complex-perspectives for approaching literature and film. The book offers authoritative, clear, and easy-to-follow explanations of theories that range from established classics to the controversies of current theory. Each chapter offers a conversational, step-by-step explanation of a single theory, critic, or issue, accompanied by concrete examples for applying the concepts and engagin...

Pocket Essentials is a dynamic series of books that are concise, lively, and easy to read. Packed with facts as well as expert opinions, each book has all the key information you need to know about such popular topics as film, television, cult fiction, history, and more. It sounds daunting: all those -isms, long technical words, weird French thinkers, and incomprehensible Germans. Most books providing introductions to "Literary Theory" are long-winded tomes, guiding dogged readers through ...

What does it mean to think beyond humanism? Is it possible to craft a mode of philosophy, ethics, and interpretation that rejects the classic humanist divisions of self and other, mind and body, society and nature, human and animal, organic and technological? Can a new kind of humanities—posthumanities—respond to the redefinition of humanity’s place in the world by both the technological and the biological or “green” continuum in which the “human” is but one life form among many?

The Literary Theory Toolkit offers readers a rich compendium of key terms, concepts, and arguments necessary for the study of literature in a critical-theoretical context.Includes varied examples drawn from readily available literary texts spanning all periods and genresFeatures a chapter on performance, something not usually covered in similar textsCovers differing theories of the public sphere, ideology, power, and the social relations necessary...