Transcultural Ecocriticism: Global, Romantic and Decolonial Perspectives

Description

Bringing together decolonial, Romantic and global literature perspectives, Transcultural Ecocriticism explores innovative new directions for the field of environmental literary studies. By examining these literatures across a range of geographical locations and historical periods – from Romantic period travel writing to Chinese science fiction and Aboriginal Australian poetry – the book makes a compelling case for the need for ecocriticism to competently translate between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, planetary and local, and contemporary and pre-modern perspectives. Leading scholars from Australasia and North America explore links between Indigenous knowledges, Romanticism, globalisation, avant-garde poetics and critical theory in order to chart tensions as well as affinities between these discourses in a variety of genres of environmental representation, including science fiction, poetry, colonial natural history and oral narrative Title Page Copyright Page Contents Figures Contributors Acknowledgements Acknowledgements for Chapter 13 Chapter 1: Thinking about transcultural ecocriticism: Space, scale and translation Notes Part 1: Planetary localities Chapter 2: Urban narrative and climate change Drowning cities: An aquatic anatomy Submarine surrealism: Nước 2030 Urban amphibiguity: New York 2140 Notes Bibliography Chapter 3: Scaling down our imagination of the human: Ted Chiang and the fable of extinction Scale effects The non-human perspective Ted Chiang’s ‘The Great Silence’ Notes Bibliography Chapter 4: ‘Re-enchanting the world’ from Mozambique: The African Anthropocene and Mia Couto’s poetics of the planet Recomposing ‘the sacred web’ amid a ‘harvest of death’ The eviscerated earth and re-animated planet Notes Bibliography Chapter 5: Ecological imaginations in contemporary Chinese science fiction Chen Qiufan and the global cycle of waste Han Song and The Red Sea An alien self in an alien world Notes Bibliography Part 2: Beyond the romantic frontier Chapter 6: The colonial translation of natures Notes Bibliography Chapter 7: Sensing empire: Travel writing, picturesque taste and British perceptions of the Indian sensory environment Notes Bibliography Chapter 8: The dark side of romantic dendrophilia Notes Bibliography Chapter 9: Shaping selves and spaces: Romanticism, botany and south-west Western Australia ‘Lost to the Sight’ Romantic visions Translocation Shipping and seeds Precision and poetry Shaping a self Extinction and erasure Notes Bibliography Part 3: Decolonial poetics Chapter 10: Transcultural ecopoetics and decoloniality in meenamatta lena narla puellakanny: Meenamatta Water Country Discussion A transcultural ecopoetic event Transcultural ecopoetics and decoloniality meenamatta lena narla puellakanny: Meenamatta Water Country Discussion ‘the blood juice cloud’: A ‘Key to writing’ Notes Bibliography Chapter 11: Theorizing decolonized literary environments Extensions of the human Oral poetics The autonomy of the aesthetic The global dimension Notes Bibliography Chapter 12: Placing invisible women: Environment, space and power in two works by Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim Historical, political and cultural contexts Between anthropological discourse and ethnocentric agendas: Forest as Maya space Recuerdos del corazón de la montaña: Forest as female space Notes Bibliography Chapter 13: Geoterritorial island poetics, or transcultural composition with a wetland in southern Chile Introducing a wetland Poetics and ethnography: Theory Poetics and ethnography: Practice Notes Bibliography Index