Description
Book SynopsisContesting Environmental Imaginaries foregrounds a question central to humanistic environmental studies: How is nature to be perceived and understood in a time of global environmental crisis? A challenge was issued to imagine counter natures, past or present, casting nature as a normative concept into productive relief. One ambition was to highlight shifting perspectives on nature and the environment that may help account for the rise of the environmental humanities; another was to invite challenges to orthodoxies, including those that animate this burgeoning field. Contributions emerged from the study areas of Environmental History, Ecocriticism, Cultural Studies, American Studies, Caribbean Studies, Scandinavian Studies, Media Studies, and the History of Ideas. This volume draws together the fruits of this thought experiment.
Table of ContentsIntroduction Steven Hartman: Naturalizing Culture and Countering Nature in Discourses of the Environment Part 1: Re-contextualizing Nature Klaus Benesch: Day and Night: Topography and Renewal in Thoreau’s Walden and Douglass’s Narrative Tatiani G. Rapatzikou: James Schuyler’s Flower Poems and the Urban Pastoral Aesthetic Øyunn Hestetun: Palimpsest of Subjugation: Inscriptions of Domination on the Land and the Human Body in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres Mark Luccarelli: Reframing American Naturism? Space, History and the Rise of Environmental Discourse Part 2: Challenging Nature and Envisioning Counternatures Lawrence Buell: Uses and Abuses of Environmental Memory Ursula K. Heise: Environment, Technology and Modernity in Contemporary Japanese Animation Torben Huus Larsen: A Harmony of Murder: Transatlantic Visions of Wilderness in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man Marcus Nordlund: Literary Appreciation: A Biocultural View Part 3: Applying Counternatures Henrik Otterberg: Dark Darwin: (D)evolutionary Theory and the Logic of Vampirism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula Torsten Pettersson: Why Should We Respect Nature? An Appropriation of Nietzsche Karen Lykke Syse: Histories and Ideologies of Nature in Argyll Adriana Méndez Rodenas: “Picturing Eden”: Contesting Fredrika Bremer’s Tropics Håkan Sandgren: Life Under Water: Narratives of Deep Sea Counternatures David E. Nye: Superfund Sites as Anti-Landscapes Index
