Digital Commons Network^™

Luis I. Prádanos. Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies And Counterhegemonic Culture In Post-2008 Spain. Liverpool Up, 2018., Shanna Lino

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Luis I. Prádanos. Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain. Liverpool UP, 2018. 246 pp.

Providence Lost: Natural And Urban Landscapes In H. P. Lovecraft's Fiction, Dylan Henderson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

S. T. Joshi, the preeminent scholar of weird fiction, considers H. P. Lovecraft a “topographical realist,” noting that, in his later fiction, Lovecraft creates realistic and painstakingly detailed settings. In “Providence Lost: Natural and Urban Landscapes in H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction,” I explore the significance of Lovecraft’s topographical realism and trace its evolution through Lovecraft’s career. I argue that Lovecraft’s early fiction, the tales, that is, that he wrote from 1917 to 1924 under the influence of Edgar Allan Poe and Lord Dunsany, pays little attention to the natural landscape, though Lovecraft does, in story after story, allude to fabulous, …

Eco-Critique And Thought As A Force Of Nature, Stephanie Erev

Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

It occurred to me not long ago that each time I read something new I pay special attention, without really meaning to, to how the work projects forward into a future or futures. This has been going on, I now think, for some years. Perhaps this quasi-conscious reading practice has played a part in the recalibration of my own orientations to the future, which, with every new climatic event, seem to grow dizzier and more disorganized, feeling some of the time like players in a game of musical chairs. Whether it is in relation to “All Around the Mulberry Bush” …

Miscellany/Méli-Mélo: Editors' Notebook, Melanie Dennis Unrau, Alec Follett, David Huebert, Siobhan Angus

The Goose

Editorial introduction to The Goose Volume 18, Issue 2 (2020).

Making It Through The Wilderness: Trees As Markers Of Gendered Identities In Sir Orfeo, Danielle Howarth

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Wood was an essential material in the Middle Ages, but trees – and human relationships with them – are too often ignored. Using trees as a lens through which to view medieval romance can provide us with a new perspective on the genre, on medieval gender norms, and on human relationships with the material non-human. This article focusses on the trees in the Middle English Sir Orfeo in order to interrogate how Orfeo’s identity is linked to trees and wooden objects. Although Orfeo’s harp is the most obvious wooden marker of his identity, the ympe-tree in Orfeo and Herodis’s orchard, …

By Shattering The Vulture’S Nose, Melissa Yang

The Goose

This project explores an unusual ornithological debate between 19th-century naturalists John James Audubon and Charles Waterton on the olfaction of vultures. Both naturalists involved were also artists—certainly more than they were scientists—and prone to artifice and performative amplification. This article examines the rhetorical dynamics of this niche but sensational debate on avian olfaction, and its problematic influence on scientific progress.

Co-Occurrence Of Keywords In Ecocriticism Research Publications: An Analytical Approach, Pranjal Deka, Mukut Sarmah

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The keyword is a significant part of scholarly publications, which can play a vital role in information retrieval and research. Author Keywords are those provided by the original authors, and Keywords Plus are those extracted from the titles of the cited references by Thomson Reuters. Keywords Plus are those created by an automatic computer algorithm; these are words or phrases that frequently appear in the titles of an article’s references and not necessarily in the article's title or as Author.

The Web of Science (WoS) database is used to conduct this study. While conducting this study, a total of 654 …

Special Focus Introduction: Literary Walks, Slow Travel, And Eco-Awareness In Contemporary Literature, Peter Arnds

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to special focus on Literary Walks, Slow Travel, and Eco-Awareness in Contemporary Literature

Sacralizing The Secular: Preserving Space In Sarah Orne Jewett’S “A White Heron”, Maria Catherina Capozzoli

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

The tides have changed. Mountains have shifted. But, Sarah Orne Jewett’s zealous love for country remains unaffected. She is the sweet fragrance of peonies and roses infusing the American literary canon. Sacralizing the Secular: Preserving Space in Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron” explores Jewett’s invention of a form suitable to the nature of her experience of country life allowed her to depict the instinctive and organic symbiotic relationship between man, woman, child, and nature in her short story, “A White Heron”: a benchmark of eco-criticism. This Earth-centered approach is informed by Cheryll Glotfelty, who set out to create the …

Eco-Traffic: Globalization, Materiality, And Subalternity In Asia-Pacific Literature, David E. St. John

English Dissertations

This project implicates globalization – the spreading of capital, neoliberalism, and Western totalitarianism – as a primary contributor to the continuing subalternity of colonized cultures and environments in the Global South. Under the guise of shrinking the world or spreading freedom, globalization has resulted in profound material consequences to biomes attempting political decolonization. Where postcolonial theory demands that attention be paid to anthropological difference, be it social, political, economic, or gendered, some ecocritical scholars of the Anthropocene wish to decenter the human from an era in which they – as a species – have emerged as a hazardous geologic force. …

Seepage: Developing And Conserving Global Literary Environmentalities, Christine D. Anlicker

English Dissertations

My dissertation identifies and compares the literary techniques that form narratives of environmentalism in Global Anglophone Literature, ecocriticism, environmental science, and environmental policy in the twentieth and the twenty-first century. I analyze the environmentalism afforded by these techniques in terms of their inclusivity and accessibility to a planetary democratic public using a method of critical analysis that is informed by postcolonial, ecocritical, queer, critical race, and democratic theorists. Due to the global, intersectional, coalitional, and democratic requirements of environmental justice, I selected literary texts to include as much of the planet as possible and to exclude texts with explicit environmentalist …

From The Horse's Mouth: Voices Of The Nonhuman In Classic Children's Literature, Kathleen A. Gekiere

Environmental Studies Honors Theses

Children’s literature often features anthropomorphized talking animal characters with individual lives and voices. This thesis clarifies the types of animal voices heard in children’s literature, utilizing a tripartite spectrum of expressions of animal emotions and perspectives, moralizing speech, and world building or plot progressing speech. This framework facilitates the exploration of the animal-human relationships and events of communication which shine through human-filtered animal voices. Using this framework, this thesis analyzes Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Hugh Lofting’s The Story of Doctor Dolittle and The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle, and C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, The Lion, the …

“From Behind The Plow”: Agrarianism And Racial Uplift In African American Literature, 1881-1917, James O'Donoghue

Dissertations

My study challenges our current valorization of movement and flow in readings of African American literature. I do so through an exploration of the representations of the black agrarian masses who either choose to remain or could not afford the spectacular forms of escape to urban life which many essentialized as freedom. In the dramatic and pivotal decades following emancipation, African American leaders attempted to check the growing apartheid by the “combination” of diverse African American communities: North and South, professional and working class. This required that they move beyond the question of whether one was free or slave to …

Elemental Climate Disaster Texts And Queer Ecological Temporality, Laura Mattson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis approaches climate disaster texts as an opportunity to challenge constructions of the body, space, and time. Developed from embodied experiential knowledge about hurricanes, my work will explore how climate disasters can teach us to reimagine human-nature relationships. In my two analysis chapters, I use critical textual analysis and autoethnography to challenge particular representations of the human-nature relationship as a binary between nature and culture. By intervening in the nature-culture binary, I theorize queer ecological temporality as an opportunity to reveal and challenge constructions of nature and time. Working at the intersections of queer and ecocritical theory, this thesis …

Imagining Wildernesses: Susan Howe’S Poetic Corrective, Samantha R. Walsh

Theses and Dissertations

This work explores language poet Susan Howe’s conceptualization of the natural world in her 1989 poem, Thorow. Conceptualization of a distinct and pure wilderness, inherited from Puritan settlers, is traced through Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and located in Howe’s experience at Lake George in 1987. This thesis describes Howe’s efforts to decolonize and open up closed historical narratives. Howe’s careful deconstruction of normative linguistic structures exposes the restrictive nature of standard syntax and canonical narratives.

"Saved? What Is Saved?": The Potentiality Of Bakhtinian Ecology In Delillo's White Noise, Kelly Gray

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Within Cartesian dualism’s traditional nature/culture divide, nature today proves uncanny: both in the uncanny return of human impact through anthropogenic climate change and in the uncanny recognition that that which was other was never really other at all. Contemporary ecocriticism, in theorizing the breakdown of this nature/culture divide, is thereby “post-naturalist.” Ecocritic Timothy Morton speaks toward this denaturalization in his work Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Drawing upon object-oriented ontology, Morton proposes hyperobjects, or objects massively distributed in time and space, as a means of reconceptualizing climate change as distinct from its manifestations in ecological …

Recalling The Georgic: Land, Labor, And Literature In American Ecological Consciousness, Sam Horrocks

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This dissertation argues that environmentalism and the environmental humanities are limited by an overinvestment in the discursive mode of pastoral, which provides the ecological logic of industrial urbanization by viewing the environment from the perspective of a leisured and alienated spectator. The pastoral mode enables environmental injustice by separating the realms of ecology and economy through a conventional elision of issues of labor and economics, rendering environmentalism unable to effect change within the spheres most important to ameliorating the pollution crisis. The pastoral mode thus frustrates the overarching goal of ecocriticism and environmentalism: we seek an ontological reunion of nature …

The Hunter And The Hunted: Kipling's Challenge To Human Exceptionalism In "The White Seal" And "Quiquern", Jessica Marie Robbins

All ETDs from UAB

Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books are some of the most well-known stories about nonhuman animals from the Victorian period, but rarely have scholars discussed this text without privileging the Mowgli stories or Kipling’s well-known colonialist alignments. In this thesis, I have challenged this scholarly tendency, showing how Kipling has paid careful attention to his nonhuman characters and given them characteristics that model the most current scientific information available at the time. My thesis argues that two of Kipling’s stories in particular, “The White Seal” and “Quiquern,” challenge the notion of human exceptionalism and force readers to confront the unsettling parallels …

Landscape, Gender, And The Politics Of Belonging In Thomas Hardy’S The Woodlanders And Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Sarah Dickerson

Master’s Theses

In my thesis, I analyze Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), exploring the way that Hardy’s depictions of both landscape and gender are interwoven to illuminate the larger issue of belonging as a central concern for his characters. I argue that in these two novels, we can analyze how one’s belonging to a physical environment and performative gender role directly relate to characters’ tragedy or success in the narratives. Characters who challenge normalized gender roles and characters whose place attachment manifests in natural rather than social spaces, endure worse tragedies than their gendered insider and …