For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Lowell Duckert shows that when playwrights and travel writers physically interacted with rivers, glaciers, monsoons, and swamps, they composed "hydrographies," or bodily and textual assemblages of human and nonhuman things that dissolved notions of human autonomy and its singular narrativity. Duckert concludes by investigating waterscapes in peril today and outlining what we can learn from early moderns' eco-ontological lessons.

Reviews

"As the hydrological turn of literary and cultural studies mixes with traditional green environmentalism and less familiar materialist discourses, early modern studies is entering new waters. With special attention to non-oceanic spaces and non-canonical texts, Lowell Duckert's brilliant and imaginative study makes the case for engaged historicist ecocriticism. In our Anthropocene age of ecological anxieties and catastrophes, Duckert contributes a vision of elemental co-composing that the critical conversation deeply needs."Steve Mentz, author of Shipwreck Modernity

"A fascinating and creative book tasked with bridging early modernity and todays global ecological crises in a sound, ethical, and philosophically responsible way." Renaissance Quarterly

Author Bio

Lowell Duckert is assistant professor of English at West Virginia University. He is coeditor of Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire.