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Under the Sign of Nature
Under the Sign of Nature is devoted to the publication of high-quality works of critical inquiry and narrative scholarship in environmental literature and related areas. The series encompasses scholarly monographs, trade books, anthologies, readers, and selected paperback reprints of classic works. Innovative interdisciplinary projects characterized by excellent writing and relevance to multiple audiences are particularly encouraged, as is international work.
Series Editors: Serenella Iovino, Kate Rigby, and John Tallmadge
UVP Editor: Boyd Zenner
New Woman Ecologies
From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond
Alicia Carroll
A transatlantic phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the "New Woman" broke away from many of the constraints of the Victorian era to enjoy a greater freedom of movement in the social, physical, and intellectual realms. As Alicia Carroll reveals, the New Woman also played... More
Of Land, Bones, and Money
Toward a South African Ecopoetics
Emily McGiffin
The South African literature of iimbongi, the oral poets of the amaXhosa people, has long shaped understandings of landscape and history and offered a forum for grappling with change. Of Land, Bones, and Money examines the shifting role of these poets in South African society and the ways in which... More
Novel Cultivations
Plants in British Literature of the Global Nineteenth Century
Elizabeth Hope Chang
Nineteenth-century English nature was a place of experimentation, exoticism, and transgression, as site and emblem of the global exchanges of the British Empire. Popular attitudes toward the transplantation of exotic species—botanical and human—to Victorian greenhouses and cities found anxious... More
Evergreen Ash
Ecology and Catastrophe in Old Norse Myth and Literature
Christopher Abram
Norse mythology is obsessed with the idea of an onrushing and unstoppable apocalypse: Ragnarok, when the whole of creation will perish in fire, smoke, and darkness and the earth will no longer support the life it once nurtured. Most of the Old Norse texts that preserve the myths of Ragnarok... More
Italy and the Environmental Humanities
Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies
Edited by Serenella Iovino, Enrico Cesaretti, and Elena Past
Bringing together new writing by some of the field’s most compelling voices from the United States and Europe, this is the first book to examine Italy--as a territory of both matter and imagination--through the lens of the environmental humanities. The contributors offer a wide spectrum of... More
Shakespeare's Ocean
An Ecocritical Exploration
Dan Brayton
Study of the sea--both in terms of human interaction with it and its literary representation--has been largely ignored by ecocritics. In Shakespeare’s Ocean, Dan Brayton foregrounds the maritime dimension of a writer whose plays and poems have had an enormous impact on literary notions of nature... More
Recomposing Ecopoetics
North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene
Lynn Keller
In the first book devoted exclusively to the ecopoetics of the twenty-first century, Lynn Keller examines poetry of what she terms the "self-conscious Anthropocene," a period in which there is widespread awareness of the scale and severity of human effects on the planet. Recomposing Ecopoetics... More
Building Natures
Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning
Julia Daniel
In Building Natures, Julia Daniel establishes the influence of landscape architecture, city planning, and parks management on American poetry to show how modernists engaged with the green worlds and social playgrounds created by these new professions in the early twentieth century. The modern poets... More
"The Best Read Naturalist"
Nature Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Michael P. Branch and Clinton Mohs
Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in American nature writing, yet until now readers have had no book devoted to this central theme in his work. "The Best Read Naturalist" fills this lacuna, placing several of Emerson’s lesser-known pieces of nature writing in conversation... More
The Sky of Our Manufacture
The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf
Jesse Oak Taylor
The smoke-laden fog of London is one of the most vivid elements in English literature, richly suggestive and blurring boundaries between nature and society in compelling ways. In The Sky of Our Manufacture, Jesse Oak Taylor uses the many depictions of the London fog in the late nineteenth- and... More
Ossianic Unconformities
Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age
Eric Gidal
In a sequence of publications in the 1760s, James Macpherson, a Scottish schoolteacher in the central Highlands, created fantastic epics of ancient heroes and presented them as genuine translations of the poetry of Ossian, a fictionalized Caledonian bard of the third century. In Ossianic... More
Anthropocene Fictions
The Novel in a Time of Climate Change
Adam Trexler
Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earth’s atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction. This period of observable human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems has been called the Anthropocene Age. The... More
Dancing with Disaster
Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times
Kate Rigby
The calamitous impacts of climate change that are beginning to be felt around the world today expose the inextricability of human and natural histories. Arguing for a more complex account of such calamities, Kate Rigby examines a variety of past disasters, from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to... More
Different Shades of Green
African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology
Byron Caminero-Santangelo
Engaging important discussions about social conflict, environmental change, and imperialism in Africa, Different Shades of Green points to legacies of African environmental writing, often neglected as a result of critical perspectives shaped by dominant Western conceptions of nature and... More
Wild Dog Dreaming
Love and Extinction
Deborah Bird Rose
We are living in the midst of the Earth’s sixth great extinction event, the first one caused by a single species: our own. In Wild Dog Dreaming, Deborah Bird Rose explores what constitutes an ethical relationship with nonhuman others in this era of loss. She asks, Who are we, as a species? How do... More
Reclaiming Nostalgia
Longing for Nature in American Literature
Jennifer K. Ladino
Often thought of as the quintessential home or the Eden from which humanity has fallen, the natural world has long been a popular object of nostalgic narratives. In Reclaiming Nostalgia, Jennifer Ladino assesses the ideological effects of this phenomenon by tracing its dominant forms in American... More
Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa
From Vermont to Italy in the Footsteps of George Perkins Marsh
John Elder
"Set aside your Bella Tuscanys and Year in Provences for a different kind of travel book. Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa puts a walking stick in your hand and Marsh’s Man and Nature in your knapsack, exploring how Italians have managed their natural and cultural heritage in ways that sustain both. John... More
William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship
The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture
Scott Hess
In William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship, Scott Hess explores Wordsworth’s defining role in establishing what he designates as "the ecology of authorship": a primarily middle-class, nineteenth-century conception of nature associated with aesthetics, high culture, individualism, and... More
Ecocritical Theory
New European Approaches
Edited by Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby
One of the more frequently lodged, serious, and justifiable complaints about ecocritical work is that it is insufficiently theorized. Ecocritical Theory puts such claims decisively to rest by offering readers a comprehensive collection of sophisticated but accessible essays that productively... More
Postcolonial Green
Environmental Politics and World Narratives
Edited by Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt
Postcolonial Green brings together scholarship bridging ecocriticism and postcolonialism. Since its inception, ecocriticism has been accused of being inattentive to the complexities that colonialism poses for ideas of nature and environmentalism. Postcolonial discourse, on the other hand, has been... More
Framing the World
Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film
Edited by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi
The essays in this collection make a contribution to the greening of film studies and expand the scope of ecocriticism as a discipline traditionally rooted in literary studies. In addition to highlighting particular films as productive tools for raising awareness and educating us about... More
Out of the Shadow
Ecopsychology, Story, and Encounters with the Land
Rinda West
In western culture, the separation of humans from nature has contributed to a schism between the conscious reason and the unconscious dreaming psyche, or internal human "nature." Our increasing lack of intimacy with the land has led to a decreased capacity to access parts of the psyche not normally... More
Daybooks of Discovery
Nature Diaries in Britain, 1770–1870
Mary Ellen Bellanca
Rooted in a thriving culture of amateur natural history, the keeping of nature journals and diaries flourished in late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century Britain. As prescientific worldviews ceded to a more materialist outlook informed by an explosion of factual knowledge, lovers of nature... More
Westernness
A Meditation
Alan Williamson
A first-person meditation on the literary and visual arts of the American West, Westernness: A Meditation explores how this region has developed its own distinct culture, in literature and painting, from the point of view of someone who has been, at different times in his life, both a westerner and... More
Topographies of the Sacred
The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism
Kate Rigby
Although the British romantic poets—notably, Blake, Wordsworth, and Byron—have been the subjects of previous ecocritical examinations, Kate Rigby’s Topographies of the Sacred is the first book to compare English and German literary models of romanticism. Rigby treats not only canonical British... More