Anglophone Literature and Culture in the Anthropocene

Anglophone Literature and Culture in the Anthropocene PDF Author: Gina Comos
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527534073
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Defined as an ecological epoch in which humans have the most impact on the environment, the Anthropocene poses challenging questions to literary and cultural studies. If, in the Anthropocene, the distinction between nature and culture increasingly collapses, we have to rethink our division between historiography and natural history, as well as notions of the subject and of agency since the Enlightenment. This anthology collects papers from literary and cultural studies that address various issues surrounding the topic. Even though the new epoch seems to require a collective self-understanding as a unified species, readings of the Anthropocene and conceptualizations of human-nature relationships largely differ in Anglophone literatures and cultures. These differing perspectives are reflected in the structure of this book, which is divided into five separate sections: the introductory part familiarizes the reader with the concept and the challenges it poses for the humanities in general and for literary and cultural studies in particular, and the three following sections combine broader, more theoretical, essays with in-depth critical readings of US, Canadian, and Australian representations of the Anthropocene in literature. The final part moves beyond literature to include media theoretical perspectives and discussions of photography and cinema in the Anthropocene.

Anglophone Literature and Culture in the Anthropocene

Anglophone Literature and Culture in the Anthropocene PDF Author: Gina Comos
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527534073
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Defined as an ecological epoch in which humans have the most impact on the environment, the Anthropocene poses challenging questions to literary and cultural studies. If, in the Anthropocene, the distinction between nature and culture increasingly collapses, we have to rethink our division between historiography and natural history, as well as notions of the subject and of agency since the Enlightenment. This anthology collects papers from literary and cultural studies that address various issues surrounding the topic. Even though the new epoch seems to require a collective self-understanding as a unified species, readings of the Anthropocene and conceptualizations of human-nature relationships largely differ in Anglophone literatures and cultures. These differing perspectives are reflected in the structure of this book, which is divided into five separate sections: the introductory part familiarizes the reader with the concept and the challenges it poses for the humanities in general and for literary and cultural studies in particular, and the three following sections combine broader, more theoretical, essays with in-depth critical readings of US, Canadian, and Australian representations of the Anthropocene in literature. The final part moves beyond literature to include media theoretical perspectives and discussions of photography and cinema in the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene

The Anthropocene PDF Author: Seth T. Reno
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100047433X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Perhaps no concept has become dominant in so many fields as rapidly as the Anthropocene. Meaning "The Age of Humans," the Anthropocene is the proposed name for our current geological epoch, beginning when human activities started to have a noticeable impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Long embraced by the natural sciences, the Anthropocene has now become commonplace in the humanities and social sciences, where it has taken firm enough hold to engender a thoroughgoing assessment and critique. Why and how has the geological concept of the Anthropocene become important to the humanities? What new approaches and insights do the humanities offer? What narratives and critiques of the Anthropocene do the humanities produce? What does it mean to study literature of the Anthropocene? These are the central questions that this collection explores. Each chapter takes a decidedly different humanist approach to the Anthropocene, from environmental humanities to queer theory to race, illuminating the important contributions of the humanities to the myriad discourses on the Anthropocene. This volume is designed to provide concise overviews of particular approaches and texts, as well as compelling and original interventions in the study of the Anthropocene. Written in an accessible style free from disciplinary-specific jargon, many chapters focus on well-known authors and texts, making this collection especially useful to teachers developing a course on the Anthropocene and students undertaking introductory research. This collection provides truly innovative arguments regarding how and why the Anthropocene concept is important to literature and the humanities.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene PDF Author: John Parham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108498531
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
From catastrophe to utopia, the most comprehensive survey yet of how literature can speak to the 'Anthropocene'.

Literature and the Anthropocene

Literature and the Anthropocene PDF Author: Pieter Vermeulen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351005405
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
The Anthropocene has fundamentally changed the way we think about our relation to nonhuman life and to the planet. This book is the first to critically survey how the Anthropocene is enriching the study of literature and inspiring contemporary poetry and fiction. Engaging with topics such as genre, life, extinction, memory, infrastructure, energy, and the future, the book makes a compelling case for literature’s unique contribution to contemporary environmental thought. It pays attention to literature’s imaginative and narrative resources, and also to its appeal to the emotions and its relation to the material world. As the Anthropocene enjoins us to read the signals the planet is sending and to ponder the traces we leave on the Earth, it is also, this book argues, a literary problem. Literature and the Anthropocene maps key debates and introduces the often difficult vocabulary for capturing the entanglement of human and nonhuman lives in an insightful way. Alternating between accessible discussions of prominent theories and concise readings of major works of Anthropocene literature, the book serves as an indispensable guide to this exciting new subfield for academics and students of literature and the environmental humanities.

Ecocriticism

Ecocriticism PDF Author: Sonja Frenzel
Publisher: Universitatsverlag Winter
ISBN: 9783825368432
Category : Ecocriticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
During the past twenty-five years, ecocriticism has become an increasingly prolific field of study. Broadly speaking, ecocriticism examines historically variable concepts of nature, environments and ecological knowledge, arguing that these concepts are largely shaped by discursive representations. The volume 'Ecocriticism - Environments in Anglophone Literatures' explores the cultural, social, ethical and theoretical challenges that our understanding of nature and environment pose from a perspective within literary studies. With particular interest in Anglophone literatures, the volume takes stock of the state of the art in ecocriticism and examines literary explorations of nature, environment, ecologies and environmental knowledge with particular interest in Anglophone literatures. More specifically, the volume sheds light on historicized and localized interrelationships between nature, culture and literature and reveals how literary texts imagine new, possibly more sustainable relationships between human beings and their nonhuman environments. Jointly, the essays provide innovative and exciting perspectives on the aesthetic agency of literature as well as on the intersections between ecocriticism and postcolonial studies. As the volume brings together a wide range of interrelated perspectives on environments, ecocriticism and ethics in Anglophone literatures, it also offers didactic impulses for rethinking the role of literature in the Anthropocene.

Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis

Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis PDF Author: Gregers Andersen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000710130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis argues that the popularity of the term "climate fiction" has paradoxically exhausted the term’s descriptive power and that it has developed into a black box containing all kinds of fictions which depict climatic events and has consequently lost its true significance. Aware of the prospect of ecological collapse as well as our apparent inability to avert it, we face geophysical changes of drastic proportions that severely challenge our ability to imagine the consequences. This book argues that this crisis of imagination can be partly relieved by climate fiction, which may help us comprehend the potential impact of the crisis we are facing. Strictly assigning "climate fiction" to fictions that incorporate the climatological paradigm of anthropogenic global warming into their plots, this book sets out to salvage the term’s speculative quality. It argues that climate fiction should be regarded as no less than a vital supplement to climate science, because climate fiction makes visible and conceivable future modes of existence within worlds not only deemed likely by science, but which are scientifically anticipated. Focusing primarily on English and German language fictions, Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis shows how Western climate fiction sketches various affective and cognitive relations to the world in its utilization of a small number of recurring imaginaries, or imagination forms. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and literary and culture studies more generally.

The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature

The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature PDF Author: Silvia Anastasijevic
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350374091
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
On what terms and concepts can we ground the comparative study of Anglophone literatures and cultures around the world today? What, if anything, unites the novels of Witi Ihimaera, the speculative fiction of Nnedi Okorafor, the life-writings by Stuart Hall, and the emerging Anglophone Arab literature by writers like Omar Robert Hamilton? This volume explores the globality of Anglophone fiction both as a conceptual framing and as a literary imaginary. It highlights the diversity of lives and worlds represented in Anglophone writing, as well as the diverse imaginations of transnational connections articulated in it. Featuring a variety of internationally renowned scholars, this book thinks through Anglophone literature not as a problematic legacy of colonial rule or as exoticizing commodity in a global literary marketplace but examines it as an inherently transcultural literary medium. Contributors provide new insights into how it facilitates the articulation of divergent experiences of modernity and the critique of hierarchies and inequalities within, among, and beyond post-colonial societies.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene PDF Author: John Parham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108580203
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch marking humanity's alteration of the Earth: its rock structure, environments, atmosphere. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene offers the most comprehensive survey yet of how literature can address the social, cultural, and philosophical questions posed by the Anthropocene. This volume addresses the old and new literary forms - from novels, plays, poetry, and essays to exciting and evolving genres such as 'cli-fi', experimental poetry, interspecies design, gaming, weird, ecotopian and petro-fiction, and 'new' nature writing. Studies range from the United States to India, from Palestine to Scotland, while addressing numerous global signifiers or consequences of the Anthropocene: catastrophe, extinction, 'fossil capital', warming, politics, ethics, interspecies relations, deep time, and Earth. This unique Companion offers a compelling account of how to read literature through the Anthropocene and of how literature might yet help us imagine a better world.

Literary Animal Studies in the Anthropocene

Literary Animal Studies in the Anthropocene PDF Author: Jiang Lifu
Publisher: Scientific Research Publishing, Inc. USA
ISBN: 1649974019
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
In 2000, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul J. Crutzen and marine-science specialist Eugene Stoermer coined the term “Anthropocene” based on the assumption that the global impacts of human activities during the last 300 years are so significant and far-reaching in scale that they lead to a new geological epoch. The Anthropocene is adopted to signify the epoch subsequent to the Holocene in which human actions are shaping the planet so profoundly that they are now acting as a geological force. In this era, human activity is the dominant influence on the environment, and all lives on earth. This is the age we are currently living in, though debates about precisely when it began continue to rage. The term has not as yet officially accepted within the field of geology; however as a frame for understanding a period of geological time marked by the significant impact of human activity on the planet, the Anthropocene has “extraordinary potential”, and it is a “unique term simultaneously oriented to the past, present and future” (Human Animal viii). As Morten T∅nnessen, Kristin Armstrong Oma argued, “no matter what one thinks about the Anthropocene, the notion radically changes how we look at nature, and mankind” (viii).

Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction

Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction PDF Author: Tereza Dědinová
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1793636648
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
In order to demonstrate that speculative fiction provides a valuable contribution to the discussion about the challenges of the Anthropocene, Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction investigates a range of novels whose subject matter pertains to various aspects of the Anthropocene. These include the destruction and protection of the natural environment, the relationship between human and non-human inhabitants of the planet, the role of myth in the shaping of and combat against the Anthropocene, the political dimensions of the Anthropocene, the ensuing threat of the Apocalypse, and the role of post-apocalyptic narratives. To explore these topics our authors examine the works of Patricia Briggs, M.R. Carey, Dmitry Glukhovsky, Ursula K. Le Guin, N.K. Jemisin, Stephenie Meyer, China Miéville, James Patterson, Maggie Stiefvater, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Scott Westfield. Their essays demonstrate that speculative fiction, given its ability to pursue scenarios of alternative history and present familiar things in an unfamiliar way, can alter the readers’ perception of their duties and responsibilities towards their communities and the world, so that the threat of human-wrought destruction might ultimately be averted.