Description
Book SynopsisFrom "Mother Earth" to "Mother Nature," women have for centuries been associated with nature. Feminists, troubled by the way in which such representations show women controlled by powerful natural forces and confined to domestic space, have sought to...
Trade ReviewUndomesticated Ground explores a dazzling array of feminist texts that endeavour to inhabit and transform nature as a place of feminist possibility. Throughout, Alaimo remains sensitive to the pitfalls of any alliance between women and nature. The texts are grouped chronologically and thematically, and each is carefully considered in relation to its social and historical moment.
-- Meredith Criglington * Canadian Literature *
Stacy Alaimo challenges essentialized conceptions of nature in Undomesticated Ground, calling for nature's reclamation as feminist space.... Alaimo persuasively asserts that feminism will benefit from a more complex understanding of nature's multiple and, at times, contradictory representations.... Her work importantly lays the groundwork by which we can articulate essentialized notions of nature, disrupt them, and then question the framework of dualisms that guides our inquiry.
-- Maureen McKnight, University of Wisconsin * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment *
Undomesticated Ground is an important and informative book, and it should set the stage for an enlivened discussion of nature and feminism.
* Choice *
Alaimo's Undmesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space ... takes on the important work of dismantling nature–culture dualisms in which culture is viewed as dynamic and nature as static.... Alaimo offers feminists an alternative path in which boundaries between human and nonhuman nature are permeable but not completely collapsed.
-- Shannon Sullivan * Hypatia *
Students of nature writing, women's literature, and more familiar forms of imaginary domesticity will find rich insights in Undomesticated Ground.
-- Barbara Ryan, University of Missouri * American Literature *
Throughout the book, Alaimo shows that women have made subversive use of the particular literary, political, and gender conventions around them to create spaces for and threads of women's liberation that do not rest on a separation from nature.... These insights are complex and generative, and I found Alaimo's analysis to be rich and thought-provoking.... In both form and content, then, this is an important book for ecological scholars of all traditions. Read it with pleasure.
-- Catriona Sandilands, York University * Environmental Ethics *
