Member Bookshelf

By Steve Mentz. Fordham University Press, 2024.

Journey through uncharted literary waters and explore Melville’s epic in bold new light

Come sail with I.

We’re not taking the same trip, though you might recognize the familiar course. This time, the Pequod’s American voyage steers its course across the curvature of the Word Ocean without anyone at the helm. We are leaving one man and his madness on shore. Our ship overflows with glorious plurality—multiracial, visionary, queer, conflicted, polyphonic, playful, violent. But on this voyage something is different. Today ...

By Jessica Carey-Webb. Vanderbilt University Press, 2024.

The Amazon extends across nine countries, encompasses forty percent of South America, and hosts four European languages and more than three hundred Indigenous languages and cultures. Eyes on Amazonia is a fascinating exploration of how Latin American, European, and US intellectuals imagined and represented the Amazon region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This multifaceted study, which draws on a range of literary and nonliterary texts and visual sources, examines the complex ways that race, gender, mobility, ...

By Carolyn Fornoff. Vanderbilt University Press, 2024.

During the twenty-first century, Mexico has escalated extractive concessions at the same time that it has positioned itself as an international leader in the fight against climate change. Cultural production emergent from this contradiction frames this impasse as a crisis of imagination. Subjunctive Aesthetics studies how contemporary writers, filmmakers, and visual artists grapple with the threat that climate change and extractivist policies pose to Mexico’s present and future. It explores how artists rise to the challenge of envisioning alternative ...

Edited by Debra J. Rosenthal. MLA Book Publications, 2024.

Over the past several decades, writers such as Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Octavia E. Butler, and Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner have explored climate change through literature, reflecting current anxieties about humans’ impact on the planet. Emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinarity, this volume embraces literature as a means to cultivate students’ understanding of the ongoing climate crisis, ethics in times of disaster, and the intrinsic intersectionality of environmental issues.

Contributors to Teaching the Literature of Climate Change discuss speculative climate ...

Edited by Debra J. Rosenthal and Jason de Lara Molesky. University of Virginia Press, 2023.

Since its emergence in the late twentieth century, climate fiction—or cli-fi—has concerned itself as much with economic injustice and popular revolt as with rising seas and soaring temperatures. Indeed, with its insistent focus on redressing social disparities, cli-fi might reasonably be classified as a form of protest literature. As environmental crises escalate and inequality intensifies, literary writers and scholars alike have increasingly scrutinized the dual exploitations of the earth’s ...

By William Steffen. Oxford University Press, 2023.

Anthropocene Theater and the Shakespearean Stage revises the anthropocentric narrative of early globalization from the perspective of the non-human world in order to demonstrate Nature’s agency in determining ecological, economic, and colonial outcomes. It welcomes readers to reimagine theater history in broader terms, and to account for more non-human and atmospheric players in the otherwise anthropocentric history of Shakespearean performance. This book analyses plays, horticultural manuals, cosmetic recipes, Puritan polemics, and travel writing in order to demonstrate ...

By Hsuan Hsu. Bloomsbury, 2024.

As a technology of environmental comfort, air conditioning aspires to pass unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. In homes, offices, libraries, museums, archives, and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body. At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non-issue in (some) people’s daily lives, thermoception—or the sensory perception of temperature—is being carefully studied and ...

By Amanda Passmore-Ott. Finishing Line Press, 2024.

Human Wilderness contains poems that explore the tension between human nature and the natural world through deep observation and reflection. The title of the collection suggests the exploration of nature leads to an even deeper exploration of what it means to be human as the poems take the reader on a lyric journey of loss, longing, becoming, understanding, and acceptance. Ultimately, Human Wilderness is a potential for metamorphosis.

Amanda Passmore-Ott teaches writing at The Pennsylvania State University and ...

By Rick Van Noy. Cornell/Three Hills, 2024.

After a near-fatal stroke and a separation, amidst a global pandemic, Rick Van Noy decided to go for a paddle. In Borne by the River, he charts the story of discovery, and healing that came from this solo canoe journey. Paddling two hundred miles on the Delaware River to his boyhood home just upriver from Trenton, New Jersey, Van Noy contemplates his fate and life, as well as the simple joy of sitting in a small boat floating down ...

By David Shackleton. Oxford University Press, 2023.

This book assesses the environmental politics of modernism in relation to the idea of the Anthropocene—a proposed geological epoch in which humans have fundamentally changed the Earth System. The early twentieth century was marked by environmental transformations that were so complex and happened on such great scales that they defied representation. Modernist novelists responded with a range of innovative narrative forms that started to make environmental crisis on a planetary scale visible. Paradoxically, however, it ...