Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Echoing Ecopoetics: Fantasy Literature's Background Sounds, Catherine Olver

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Despite David Abram’s fear that reading disrupts people’s “attunement to environing nature,” fantasy literature can vibrantly convey how to hear our environments as it describes characters attuning their ears to particular places. Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series (1995-2021) and Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy (2008-10) develop an echoing ecopoetics of place through both world-building and style. Their fantasy worlds emphasize that characters must relearn to listen in unfamiliar environments: adjusting their expectations and interpretations of background sounds, recognising significant silences, adapting to new ways of communicating, and seeking meaning in nonhuman sounds rather than dismissing them as noise. Their stylistic …