E-Book Overview
Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism is a collection of new work which examines the intersection between philosophy, literature, visual art, film and the environment at a time of environmental crisis. This book is unusual in the way in which the 'imaginative', 'creative', element is privileged, notwithstanding the creativity of rigorous cultural criticism. Genuinely interdisciplinary, this book aims to be inclusive in its discussions of diverse cultural media (different literary genres, art forms and film for instance), which offer thoughtful and thought-provoking critiques of our relationships with the environment. Our ability to transcend the ethical and aesthetic categories and discourses that have contributed to our alienation from our environment is dependant upon an enlargement of our imaginative capacities. In a modest way this book might contribute to what Ted Hughes, speaking of the imagination of each new child, described as "nature's chance to correct culture's error".
E-Book Content
Culture, Creativity and Environment
Nature, Culture and Literature 05
General Editors: Hubert van den Berg (University of Groningen) Axel Goodbody (University of Bath) Marcel Wissenburg (University of Nijmegen)
Advisory Board: Jonathan Bate (University of Warwick) Hartmut Böhme (Humboldt University, Berlin) Heinrich Detering (University of Kiel) Andrew Dobson (Keele University) Marius de Geus (Leiden University) Terry Gifford (University of Leeds) Demetri Kantarelis (Assumption College, Worcester MA) Richard Kerridge (Bath Spa University College) Michiel Korthals (Wageningen University) Svend Erik Larsen (University of Aarhus) Patrick Murphy (University of Central Florida) Kate Rigby (Monash University) Avner de-Shalit (Hebrew University Jerusalem) Piers Stephens (Michigan State University) Nina Witoszek (University of Oslo)
Culture, Creativity and Environment
New Environmentalist Criticism
Edited by
Fiona Becket and Terry Gifford
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Cover Design: Erick de Jong The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2250-8 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in the Netherlands
Contents
Introduction Fiona Becket and Terry Gifford
7
Journey to the Heart of Stone Val Plumwood
17
What is (ecological) ‘nature’? John Stuart Mill and the Victorian Perspective John Parham
37
Fear and Flowers in Anya Gallaccio’s Forest Floor, Keep off the Grass, Glaschu and Repens Judith Rugg
55
Like a Ship to be Tossed: Emersonian Environmentalism and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping Hannes Bergthaller
75
In the Mirror of Middle Earth: Langland’s use of the world as a book and what we can make of it Gillian Rudd
99
Poodles and Curs: Eugenic Comedy in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People Greg Garrard
115
The Hunter as Nature-Lover: Idyll, aggression and ecology in the German animal stories of Otto Alscher Axel Goodbody
135
6
Table of Contents
Postcolonialism, Ecocriticism and the Animal in Recent Canadian Fiction Graham Huggan
161
Barry MacSweeney’s Moorland Romance Matthew Jarvis
181
Painting Landscape: Mediating Dislocation Judith Tucker
197
Modernity and the Politics of Place in Luis Trenker’s Der verlorene Sohn Guinevere Narraway
215
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: Ecopoetics and the Problem of Humanism Louise Westling
233
Notes on Contributors
249
Index
253
Introduction Fiona Becket