New International Voices in Ecocriticism

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With twelve original essays that characterize truly international ecocriticisms, New International Voices in Ecocriticism presents a compendium of ecocritical approaches, including ecocritical theory, ecopoetics, ecocritical analyses of literary, cultural, and musical texts (especially those not commonly studied in mainstream ecocriticism), and new critical vistas on human-nonhuman relations, postcolonial subjects, material selves, gender, and queer ecologies. It develops new perspectives on literature, culture, and the environment. The essays, written by contributors from the United States, Canada, Germany, Turkey, Spain, China, India, and South Africa, cover novels, drama, autobiography, music, and poetry, mixing traditional and popular forms. Popular culture and the production and circulation of cultural imaginaries feature prominently in this volumehow people view their world and the manner in which they share their perspectives, including the way these perspectives challenge each other globally and locally. In this sense the book also probes borders, border transgression, and border permeability. By offering diverse ecocritical approaches, the essays affirm the significance and necessity of international perspectives in environmental humanities, and thus offer unique responses to environmental problems and that, in some sense, affect many beginning and established scholars.

Reviews

With essays from 12 doctoral students, this volume showcases emergent voices and celebrates the current diversity of critical approaches in ecocriticism. Most of the essays examine environmental issues within traditional literary genres, but a few analyze forms of pop culture, such as television sitcoms and heavy metal music. In a useful introduction, Oppermann offers a survey of the global contexts of ecocriticism. The essays themselves appear in three sections. The first, 'New Ecocritical Trends,' proposes a set of theoretical approaches: deconstructive ecocriticism, 'postlocal ecocriticism,' 'affective ecocriticism,' and 'gothic ecocriticism.' The second section explores how ecocriticism has moved beyond a concern with nature: these essays discuss the relationships among environment, culture, identity, and power and examine concepts of the 'un-natural' and the marginalized, place, and displacement. The final section focuses on human and animal relations in contemporary literature. The volume features an impressively transnational group of young scholars . . . The collection offers an interesting set of provocations and offers a glimpse of how ecocriticism might evolve as an increasingly global field of study. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. * CHOICE *
Gothic ecocriticism. Eco-eroticism. Postlocalism. Unnatural eco-poetics. New materialisms. Eco-aesthetics Serpil Oppermanns farsighted, courageous project is here to show what ecocritical scholarship stands for: not only eliciting new categories, but also enabling new visions and creativities. The international voices speaking from these pages are telling us that the future of ecocriticism is here and now. -- Serenella Iovino, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Turin, Italy
A needed spur to a more globalized field, New International Voices in Ecocriticism presents a lucid argument for why the ecocritical future must be geographically and temporally capacious. Combining activism and environmental justice and a focus on materiality with ethical generosity, the essays collected in this book offer a compelling vision of ecocriticism as an interdisciplinary and transformative practice. Serpil Oppermann is to be commended for gathering so many fine, emergent voices in this indispensable forum, and for composing an introduction for the book that serves as a manifesto for work to come. -- Jeffrey J. Cohen, George Washington University

Author Bio

Serpil Oppermann is professor of English at Hacettepe University.