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Many contemporary environmental risks and global environmental changes occurring today are unprecedented in the history of human life on earth. However, the images and narratives through which humans relate to these phenomena are built on existing cultural tropes and narrative models. Cultural, social, and historical contexts strongly influence how we construct images and narratives of nature and the environment. It is therefore highly important to study such narratives in works of literature, film, and other forms of cultural expression in relation to the specific circumstances from which they arise. Nordic Narratives of Nature and the Environment is the first English language anthology that presents ecocritical research on northern European literatures and cultures. The contributors examine specifically Nordic narratives of nature and the environment, with a focus on the cultures and literatures of the modern northern European countries Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, including Sápmi, which is the land traditionally inhabited by the indigenous Sami people. Covering northern European literatures and cultures over a period of more than two centuries, this anthology provides substantial insights into both old and new narratives of nature and the environment as well as intertextual relations, the variety of cultural traditions, and current discourses connected to the Nordic environmental imagination. Case studies relating to works of literature, film, and other media shed new light on the role of culture, history and society in the formation of narratives of nature and the environment, and offer a comprehensive and multi-faceted overview of the most recent ecocritical research in Scandinavian studies.
Privileging the visual as the main method of communication and meaning-making, this book responds critically to the worldwide discussion about the Arctic and the North, addressing the interrelated issues of climate change, ethics and geopolitics. A multi-disciplinary, multi-modal exploration of the Arctic, it supplies an original conceptualization of the Arctic as a visual world encompassing an array of representations, imaginings, and constructions. By examining a broad range of visual forms, media and forms such as art, film, graphic novels, maps, media, and photography, the book advances current debates about visual culture. The book enriches contemporary theories of the visual taking the Arctic as a spatial entity and also as a mode of exploring contemporary and historical visual practices, including imaginary constructions of the North. Original contributions include case studies from all the countries along the Arctic shore, with Russian material occupying a large section due to the country’s impact on the region
Nature interpretation in the Nordic countries is a book about communication between nature interpreters and their participants in our landscapes. It´s about first hand experiences of nature and the importance of to paying attention to what is inspiring and fascinating, especially valuable or threatened. And about possibilities to reflect over the relation between human and nature. Educators, researchers and interpreters contribute with articles about nature interpretation it theory and practice. The book is written for everyone who is interested in how interpretation can contribute to a sustainable future, nature conservation and areas in society like public health, democracy and the right for all citizens to visit and experience nature. The purpose is to inspire nature interpreters to offer more and even better experiences and learning in the Nordic nature and cultural landscapes.
This book extensively analyzes the literary works of fiction that draw on the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami that occurred on March 11, 2011. This disaster inspired literally hundreds of fictional works in Japan from the time of the events through 2017. This response represents a unique and perhaps unprecedented cultural phenomenon in the world. Since a variety of writers in different genres, and even amateurs, have written and published books inspired by their experiences of the disaster, it is extremely difficult to cover the entire body of Japanese “post-3.11 literature”. Because of the breadth of this literary response, there is a scarcity of research on the subject available. This book offers the first comprehensive review of Japan’s recent post-disaster literary production to the English audience.
This volume presents key contributions to the study of ecocriticism in Nordic children’s and YA literary and cultural texts, in dialogue with international classics. It investigates the extent to which texts for children and young adults reflect current environmental concerns. The chapters are grouped into five thematic areas: Ethics and Aesthetics, Landscape, Vegetal, Animal, and Human, and together they explore Nordic representations and a Nordic conception, or feeling, of nature. The textual analyses are complemented with the lived experiences of outdoor learning practices in preschools and schools captured through children’s own statements. The volume highlights the growing influence of posthumanist theory and the continuing traces of anthropocentric concerns within contemporary children’s literature and culture, and a non-dualistic understanding of nature-culture interaction is reflected in the conceptual tool of the volume: The Nature in Culture Matrix.
This book will provide a thematic overview of one of European history’s most devastating famines, the Great Finnish Famine of the 1860s. In 1868, the nadir of several years of worsening economic conditions, 137,000 people (approximately 8% of the Finnish population) perished as the result of hunger and disease. The attitudes and policies enacted by Finland’s devolved administration tended to follow European norms, and therefore were often similar to the “colonial” practices seen in other famines at the time. What is distinctive about this catastrophe in a mid-nineteenth-century context, is that despite Finland being a part of the Russian Empire, it was largely responsible for its own governance, and indeed was developing its economic, political and cultural autonomy at the time of the famine. Finland’s Great Famine 1856-68 examines key themes such as the use of emergency foods, domestic and overseas charity, vagrancy and crime, emergency relief works, and emigration.
Throughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential difference—rather than a porous transition—between the human and animal. Attempts to assign essential properties to humans (e.g., language, reason, or morality) often reflected ulterior aims to defend a privileged position for humans.. This book shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the questions “What is human?” and “What is animal?” What makes this collection unique is that it fills a lacuna in critical animal studies and the growing field of ecocriticism. It is the first collection that establishes a productive encounter between philosophical perspectives on the human–animal boundary and those that draw on fictional literature. The objective is to establish a dialogue between those disciplines with the goal of expanding the imaginative scope of human-animal relationships. The contributions thus do not only trace and deconstruct the boundaries dividing humans and nonhuman animals, they also present the reader with alternative perspectives on the porous continuum and surprising reversal of what appears as human and what as nonhuman.
Italian writer and filmmaker Gianni Celati’s 1989 philosophical travelogue Towards the River’s Mouth explores perception, memory, place and space as it recounts a series of journeys across the Po River Valley in northern Italy. The book seeks to document the “new Italian landscape” where divisions between the urban and rural were being blurred into what Celati terms “a new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude.” Celati traveled by train, by bus, and on foot, at times with photographer Luigi Ghirri, at others exploring on his own without predetermined itineraries, taking notes on the places he encountered, watching and listening to people in stations, fields, bars, houses, squares, and hotels. In this way the book took shape as Celati traveled and wrote, gathering and rewriting his notes into “stories of observation” (9). Celati attempts to find meaning by seeking the uncertain limits of our ability to discern everyday surroundings. “Every observation,” as he puts it, “needs liberate itself from the familiar codes it carries, to go adrift in the middle of all things not understood, in order to arrive at an outlet, where it must feel lost.” At the forefront of the then-nascent spatial turn in the humanities, Towards the River’s Mouth is a key text of what in recent years has been variously termed literary cartography, literary geography, and spatial poetics. Its call to carefully and affectionately examine our surroundings while attempting to step back from habitual ways of perceiving and moving through space, has resonated as much with literary scholars and other writers as with geographers and architects. By now a classic of twentieth-century Italian literature, it has in recent years garnered increasing attention, especially with the growth of ecocriticism and new materialism within the environmental humanities. This edition, translated into English for the first time, features an introduction that places Towards the River’s Mouth in the context of Celati’s other work, and a selection of ten scholarly essays by prominent figures in comparative literature and Italian studies.
While there exist numerous studies on ecocriticism and ecofeminism, much less has been written about ecomasculinities. This volume contributes to filling this gap by examining models of fictional ecomasculinity in and through contemporary U.S. literature and cinema. Our study examines ecomasculinities as practices of masculinity which are deeply conservationist and can embrace non-masculine traits. In this line of thought, a main goal of the volume is to interrogate the potential of ecomasculinities to elicit in men a desire to become engage in other practices of masculinity that are counter-hegemonic and have as main goal to achieve equality on different strata of society. Bridging the gap between the Social Sciences and the Humanities, the book interrogates intersections between ecomasculinities and masculinities beyond capitalism, ecomasculinities and aging, and ecomasculinities and queerness, among others.
Ecopoetics and the Global Landscape: Critical Essays surveys ecopoetry from a global perspective across different historical epochs. Its comparative approach foregrounds the importance of ecopoetics within the context of distinct national literatures and cultures to reveal the ubiquitous intersection of poetry with ecocriticism. The collection analyzes environmental problems resulting from the legacies of colonialism and focuses on issues of environmental justice and indigenous issues as well as on the intersection of genocide studies and environmentalism. It also examines ecologically-informed modes of relating to the world. In particular, it engages with interactions between the human and nonhuman as well as mind and matter. Finally, it broadens the scope of place to include both the absent land of exiled peoples, and the urban, built environment.