Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Beauty is perceived in and through cultural channels. However, because beauty is mediated does not by any means foreclose the idea that beauty is real and resides in the natural world. An ecologically inflected understanding of beauty and our perceptions and representations of it are essential to human flourishing."—Neil W. Browne, author of The World in Which We Occur
"This important, even game-changing collection is motivated by the admirable impulse to reinsert beauty and aesthetics into the critical discourse of ecocriticism."—Christoph Irmscher, author of Louis Agassis: Creator of American Science
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction / Peter Quigley
I. The Relevance of Beauty
1. "It is out of fashion to say so": The Language of Nature and the Rhetoric of Beauty in Robinson Jeffers / Tim Hunt
2. Thoreau's Poetics of Nature / Arnold Berleant
3. The Pout's Nest and the Painter's Eye / Frank Stewart
4. "Yet How Beautiful It Is!": Work, Ethics, and Beauty in Stegner's Angle of Repose / Tyler Nickl
5. Renaissance Aesthetics, Picturesque Beauty, the Natural Landscape: An Essay Examining the Rise and Fall of the Impulse toward Beauty / Mark Luccarelli
II. Beauty and Engagement
6. Toward an Ecofeminist Aesthetic of Reconnection / Greta Gaard
7. Beauty and the Body: Towards an Ecofeminist Aesthetic that Includes Loving Our Naked Selves / Janine DeBaise
8. Dystopia and Utopia in a Nuclear Landscape: Emerging Aesthetics in Satoyama / Yuki Masami
9. Know Beauty, Know Justice: Why Beauty Matters in the Classroom / ShaunAnne Tangney
III. Materiality, Transcendence, and Aesthetics
10. Nature's Colors: A Prismatic Materiality in the Natural/Cultural Realms / Serpil Oppermann
11. From the Human to the Divine: Nature in the Writings of the Tamil Poet-Saints / Cynthia J. Miller
12. Beauty as Ideological and Material Transcendence / Werner Bigell
13. Toward Sustainable Aesthetics: The Poetry of Food, Sex, Water, Architecture, and Bicycle-Riding / Scott Slovic
Index