Ecocritical Concerns and the Australian Continent

(Hardback)

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Description

Ecocritical Concerns and the Australian Continent investigates literary, historical, anthropological, and linguistic perspectives in connection with activist engagements. The necessary cross-fertilization between these different perspectives throughout this volume emerges in the resonances between essays exploring recurring concerns ranging from biodiversity and preservation policies to the devastating effects of the mining industries, to present concerns and futuristic visions of the effects of climate change. Of central concern in all of these contexts is the impact of settler colonialism and an increasing turn to indigenous knowledge systems. A number of chapters engage with questions of ecological imperialism in relation to specific sociohistorical moments and effects, probing early colonial encounters between settlers and indigenous people, or rereading specific forms of colonial literature. Other essays take issue with past and present constructions of indigeneity in different contexts, as well as with indigenous resistance against such ascriptions, while the importance of an understanding of indigenous notions of care for country is taken up from a variety of different disciplinary angles in terms of interconnectedness, anchoredness, living country, and living heritage.

Reviews

The book does a splendid job in opening up important and inspiring conversations--between writers and scholars, ecocritical as well as postcolonial critics, literary studies, cultural studies, linguistics, and history. A timely must-read for everyone interested in research on Australia and the Environmental Humanities that exemplifies why postcolonial studies should be inherently ecocritical while ecocriticism is inherently postcolonial.

--Roman Bartosch, University of Cologne

This is a timely and wide-ranging interdisciplinary volume that offers both breadth and depth in its expert coverage of contemporary ecocritical issues in Australia. It comprises an important collection of essays that will be essential reading for environmental humanities scholars and all those concerned with the global and local effects of the Anthropocene.

--Sue Kossew, Monash University

Author Bio

Beate Neumeier is professor of English literature at the University of Koln in Germany. Helen Tiffin is adjunct professor of post-colonial and animal studies at the University of New England, Australia.