New international voices in ecocriticism / [edited by] Serpil Oppermann.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

With twelve original essays that characterize truly international ecocriticisms, New International Voices in Ecocriticism presents a compendium of ecocritical approaches, including ecocritical theory, ecopoetics, ecocritical analyses of literary, cultural, and musical texts (especially those not commonly studied in mainstream ecocriticism), and new critical vistas on human-nonhuman relations, postcolonial subjects, material selves, gender, and queer ecologies. It develops new perspectives on literature, culture, and the environment. The essays, written by contributors from the United States, Canada, Germany, Turkey, Spain, China, India, and South Africa, cover novels, drama, autobiography, music, and poetry, mixing traditional and popular forms. Popular culture and the production and circulation of cultural imaginaries feature prominently in this volume--how people view their world and the manner in which they share their perspectives, including the way these perspectives challenge each other globally and locally. In this sense the book also probes borders, border transgression, and border permeability. By offering diverse ecocritical approaches, the essays affirm the significance and necessity of international perspectives in environmental humanities, and thus offer unique responses to environmental problems and that, in some sense, affect many beginning and established scholars.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

With essays from 12 doctoral students, this volume showcases emergent voices and celebrates the current diversity of critical approaches in ecocriticism. Most of the essays examine environmental issues within traditional literary genres, but a few analyze forms of pop culture, such as television sitcoms and heavy metal music. In a useful introduction, Oppermann (English, Hacettepe Univ., Turkey) offers a survey of the global contexts of ecocriticism. The essays themselves appear in three sections. The first, "New Ecocritical Trends," proposes a set of theoretical approaches: deconstructive ecocriticism, "postlocal ecocriticism," "affective ecocriticism," and "gothic ecocriticism." The second section explores how ecocriticism has moved beyond a concern with nature: these essays discuss the relationships among environment, culture, identity, and power and examine concepts of the "un-natural" and the marginalized, place, and displacement. The final section focuses on human and animal relations in contemporary literature. The volume features an impressively transnational group of young scholars; unfortunately, their objects of study remain largely Anglocentric. Still, the collection offers an interesting set of provocations and offers a glimpse of how ecocriticism might evolve as an increasingly global field of study. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. --Shannon Gayk, Indiana University