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Popular Terroir: Bande Dessinée As Pastoral Ecocriticism?, Margaret C. Flinn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article analyses a corpus of French comic books (including series and one-shots) published since 2010 that share a thematic focus on agriculture. I argue that this mini-explosion in French comics publishing that crosses various generic and reading public boundaries can be viewed as a contemporary iteration of the pastoral. This ever-expanding body of texts is guided by ecocritical preoccupations, through their engagement with terroir. Because of the cultural connotations of terroir in modern and contemporary France, these comics are situated at the intersection of environmentally progressive and culturally conservative discourses.

Questioning Gynocentric Utopia: Nature As Addict In “Description Of Cookeham”, Liberty S. Stanavage

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In her 1610 “The Description of Cookeham,” Amelia Lanyer presents Cookeham as a space in which women and nature exist in poetry-inducing harmony until the intervention of man. Lanyer’s poem highlights the deference of both the animals (who “sport . . . in her eye” and “attend”), and the landscape to Clifford: the hills “descend” to meet her footstep and then raise themselves again at her whim. This alignment frequently leads critics to describe Cookeham as a utopian feminist landscape that aligns women and nature against an antagonistic masculine influence.

However, this utopian vision dramatizes a landscape that is not …