How do poets, writers and cultural critics contend with and represent the garden or their own gardening as they are changed by austerity? Gardening under austerity encompasses a diversity of places, spaces, practices, and actors: suburban allotments and zoological gardens, Victory diggers and urban foragers, human gardeners and the unruly more-than-human world. Theorizing the politics, poetics and practices of austerity gardening in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone cultural texts, The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times explores the variegated impact of austerity in conjunction with the representation of the garden in the national context of England in the mid-century, and how garden imagery is embedded within and illuminates the political, economic, and social contexts of literary production.
Dike Okoro analyzes the various manifestations of ecocriticism and political activism in the poetry of Lupenga Mphande, who is arguably Africa’s first poet to explore the existence of territorial cults and natural shrines. This book is recommended for students and scholars seeking new interpretations of the African experience in contemporary world literature.
Cultivated Therapeutic Landscapes provides an in-depth and critical explora-tion of the impact of gardens and gardening on health and wellbeing. In this book we explore the ways in which gardens and gardening prevent illness and restore wellbeing, and how they improve social and health equity via tradi-tional and innovative mechanisms and across a range of sites. Therapeutic landscapes are relational, reciprocal, and evolving. In this book, leading scholars from across the globe demonstrate how therapeutic landscapes research and practice is expanded through and around the pro-cesses of cultivation. Deliberately interdisciplinary, the book explores how tending and caring for green spaces, collectively and individually, works to pre-vent and restore health and wellbeing, as well as impact upstream factors de-termining social justice and equity. A unique combination of academics, clinicians, and practitioners deliver theoretical and practical insights into wide-ranging health-enabling factors, based on new evidence and autoethno-graphic experiences in home gardens, school, and community gardens, clinical settings, public green spaces, and sites of conservation and wildness. This book pushes concepts of cultivation and horticulture into underexplored spatial, on-tological, and wellbeing territories. Despite long-term practical interest, thera-peutic horticulture is only now establishing a strong theoretical and research foundation. This book provides much-needed critical insights into the impact on the key drivers of health, wellbeing, and social equity, with a focus on practical skills for utilising horticulture or designing for particular health needs. It will be of interest to students, scholars, and practitioners in the areas of health geogra-phy; cultural geography; cultural studies; therapeutic horticulture; environ-mental studies; community development and planning; landscape architecture; social work; health studies; and health policy.
Embracing the intersectional methodological outlook of the environmental humanities, the contributors to this edited collection explore the entanglements of cultures, ecologies, and socio-ethical issues in the roles of trees and their relationships with humans through narratives in literature and art.
A friend and associate of the Transcendentalists in Concord, Nathaniel Hawthorne has rarely been taken seriously as a writer interested in the natural world. This book seeks to redress this omission by elucidating the sense of environmentality that emanates from Hawthorne’s romances and other writings. Hawthorne’s sense of kinship with the natural world runs deep in his work, particularly when his fiction is examined alongside his voluminous notebooks. Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature also contributes to the growing scholarly work aiming to illuminate Hawthorne as a writer deeply engaged in the issues of his day, particularly involving the environment, rather than an author simply interested in reinterpreting colonial history. Today’s readers stand to gain a rich new understanding of Hawthorne by reassessing Hawthorne’s attitude toward the natural world.
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.
Turkish Ecocriticism: From Neolithic to Contemporary Timescapes explores the values, perceptions, and transformations of the environment, ecology, and nature in Turkish culture, literature, and the arts. Through these themes, it examines historical and contemporary environmentally engaged literary and cultural traditions in Turkey. The volume re-imagines Turkey in its geo-social and ecocultural narratives of multiple connections and complexities, in its multi-faceted webs of histories, and in its rich multispecies stories.
Migrant Ecologies investigates the ways in which Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry exposes the entanglements of migrant ecologies embedded within local and global networks of capital and labor. The author contends that women migrant workers in particular, as portrayed in Zheng’s poems, are the visible manifestation of the interconnections between the so-called “factories of the world” and slum villages-in-the-city, between urban development and rural decline, and between the local environmental degradation and the global market. By adopting an ecological approach to Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers in China, the author explores what Donna Haraway calls “webbed ecologies” (49). The concept of “ecologies” serves to enhance not only the layered, complex interconnections underlying women migrant workers’ plight and environmental degradation in China, but also the emergence and transformation of migrant spaces, subjects, activism, and networks resulting in part from globalization.
Throughout the world, people spend much of their time with animal companions of various kinds, frequently with cats and dogs. What meanings do we make of these relationships? In the ecocritical collection Reading cats and Dogs, a diverse array of scholars considers the philosophy, literature, and film devoted to human relationships with companion species. In addition to illuminating famous animal stories by Beatrix Potter, Jack London, Italo Svevo, and Michael Ondaatje, readers are introduced to the dog poems of Shuntarō Tanikawa, a Turkish documentary on stray cats as neighborhood companions, and the representation of diverse animal companions in Cameroonian novels. Focusing on “Stray and Feral Companions,” “The Usefulness of Companion Animals,” and “Problematizing Companion Animals,” Reading Cats and Dogs aims both to confirm and topple readers’ assumptions about the fellow travelers with whom we share our lives, our streets and fields, and our planet. Fifteen contributors from various countries reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and psychological complexities of our multispecies relationships, demonstrating the richness of ecocritical animal studies.
Now more than ever—in a time when Americans still do not believe that humans are the primary cause of Earth's climate change crisis, the burden on educators to inform, challenge, and motivate students about sustainability is greater than it ever has been. On college campuses, writing intensive courses, often located within First-Year or General Education curricula, are an ideal place to take up this charge because of the flexibility of their content and the high volume of students that they reach. In this volume, a varied group of composition instructors with wide ranges and types of experiences provides best practices for bringing issues surrounding climate change into the writing classroom. From literature-based composition and creative writing courses to design thinking workshops to seminars "against sustainability," the authors in this volume lay out a multitude of possibilities for blending writing and environmental concerns that fellow practitioners can easily adopt or modify for their own use.
