Centre for Environmental Humanities
One of the UK’s leading centres for research on the environmental humanities
The Centre for Environmental Humanities seminar series is back this term with a programme of online research seminars.
The CEH Research Seminar is convened by Dr Sarah Daw, and will take place on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons. For full details, including how to receive the Zoom link, visit our events page.
The University of Augsburg and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich invite applications for 12 Doctoral Positions in their new International Doctorate Program (IDK) funded by the Elite Network of Bavaria. Deadline: 15 April 2021
From the Rachel Carson Centre website:
Based at the Environmental Science Center WZU (Augsburg) and the Rachel Carson Center (Munich), the program offers a unique opportunity to pursue a PhD degree under the supervision of faculty from both universities: each doctoral student will be supervised by an interdisciplinary team. Participating disciplines include American Studies, Anthropology, Didactics of Geography, Economics, Environmental Ethics, Environmental Health Sciences, Environmental Humanities, Environmental Philosophy, History, Human Geography, Iberian & Latin American Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Theology. Languages are English and German. The program is continuously supported by international guest professors, experienced practitioners, and creative artists/writers whose work focuses on environmental topics.
We offer positions (65%, TVL-13) to twelve doctoral students for a period of three years who want to explore the topic of the IDK from an interdisciplinary perspective. Possible topics can be found on the IDK website. In addition to these funded positions, there is a limited number of non-funded doctoral affiliations (“Promotionsplätze”) available for candidates who have already obtained external PhD funding. The IDK starts on 1 October 2021.
We welcome applications from all participating disciplines and particularly encourage interdisciplinary proposals. Applicants must have a completed degree (M.A., M.Sc. or equivalent) with above average grades in one of the participating disciplines. Submissions should include the online application form (available from our website), a letter of motivation (400 words max.), a short CV (max. 2 pages), a PhD proposal (max. 1800 words, including abstract and timeline), copies of your university degree(s), a recent publication (e.g. peer-reviewed article, book chapter), or your final thesis if applicable. The application may be written in either English or German. Please make sure to send all documents and certificates electronically as a single pdf file (up to 8 MB).
Applicants are expected to speak either German or English fluently upon entering the program. If you have no knowledge of one of them, you are expected to acquire basic skills in that language during the first year of the program (both universities offer language courses).
Reflecting the participating universities’ commitment to excellence, we seek to increase the diversity of our doctoral student body to support this objective and particularly encourage applicants from underrepresented groups and regions. We especially welcome applications from qualified women. Our Universities stand up for compatibility of family and professional life. For more information, please contact our women’s representative offices. This position is suitable for the severely disabled. In the case of equally qualified candidates, applicants with disabilities will be given preference.
Internationally acclaimed poet, Tjawangwa Dema (The Careless Seamstress and Mandible) will be reading from her work as part of the University of Southern California’s Visions and Voices platform. Dema is a poet, arts administrator, teaching artist, and an Honorary Senior Research Associate in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. Her writing includes work around eco-poetry, and identity and the pastoral form in poetry.
After the reading, Dema will be joined in conversation by Dr Kirk Sides of the Centre for Environmental Humanities and the Department of English at the University of Bristol.
The event takes place on Thursday 25 February at 8pm GMT, and is free. Registration is through Eventbrite.
Tjawangwa Dema’s poems are as bold, roving, and insistent as they are delicate and incisive.
Tracy K. Smith, U.S. poet laureate
Don’t miss internationally acclaimed Motswana poet Tjawangwa Dema, as she reads from her prize-winning collections The Careless Seamstress and Mandible, and performs spoken word pieces from throughout her career, reflecting on life in Botswana, the United States, and England.
By foregrounding inquiry as a poetic practice, Dema invests the mundane with philosophy and ordinary beings with beauty while exploring ecopoetry, gender, race, disobedience, labor, mythology, and empathy.
Eventbrite listing
Kirk Sides has been awarded a “Futures” Fellowship by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.
From February to May, Kirk will be in residence at the Carson Center in Munich and working on a chapter titled “Eco-Futurism: Mythopoiesis, Science Fiction, and the African Anthropocene.” This work forms part of a current book manuscript, African Anthropocene: The Ecological Imaginary in African Literatures, which explores the relationship between ecological forms of writing and decolonial thought in African literary and cultural production across the twentieth century. The book charts a long history of ecological thinking in cultural production from across the African continent, tracing how anti-colonial writing of the early twentieth century prefigured contemporary turns towards speculative and science fiction for thinking about global climate change and planetary futures.
While in residence Kirk will also be contributing to both the Centre Fellows’ Colloquia as well as to the Center’s blog.
African Anthropocene: The Ecological Imaginary in African Literatures explores the relationship between environmental thinking and anti-colonial politics in African literary and cultural production across the twentieth century, andargues for expanded historical timelines for thinking about the environment in African literature, film and artistic production. While much of the ecocritical historicism looking to the African continent begins with the mid-twentieth century moment of political independence and decolonization, my project makes the case for much earlier forms of ecological thinking that informed writing from the continent from at least the start of the twentieth century. In turn, these earlier articulations of ecological awareness often functioned as the basis for formulations of anti-colonial politics. The project begins by charting a long history of ecological thinking beginning with the cultural production from anti-colonial writing of the early twentieth century, and then focuses on contemporary turns towards speculative and science fiction for thinking climate change and planetary futures. Focusing on literary texts, political discourses, as well as filmic and artistic production, African Anthropocene argues that various cultural archives from the African continent display a history of ecological awareness that long predates the moment of political independence and subsequent decolonization of the mid-twentieth century. The turn to ecocriticism in the fields of African humanities broadly and African literatures more specifically has been relatively recent, and these studies are also characteristically marked by their chronologies, which re-inscribe a postcolonial historiography to the emergence of an environmental awareness in African literary and cultural production. My project, on the other hand, begins at the start of the twentieth century and demonstrates how authors and intellectuals on the African continent at this time were already deeply invested in ecological understandings of local places. In turn, these ecological writings are the basis for early and often nascent forms of anti-colonial politics which predate the more popularized expressions of the mid-twentieth century and the moment political independence.
African Anthropocene also argues that by looking at the ways in which environmental relationships are encoded through practices of storytelling we are able to see how returns to mythology and creation stories often function as forms for imagining possible ecological futures. My research traces a genealogy of African environmental thought, which I argue is an ecological imaginary that is both deeply historical, especially in its accessing of mythological registers, but is also oriented towards planetary futures through its increasing turns towards science/speculative fiction. African science fiction is indeed a productive imaginary to think through the ecological potentialities of the Anthropocene for the African continent in the contemporary moment. But what I call ‘eco-futurism’ in the project is a mode that has also been employed by earlier generations of African writers. I argue that the ecological imagination in African literature, and its framing through science or speculative fiction, or even “speculative fabulation” as Donna Haraway calls it, has a much longer history within writing from the continent. I read the African Anthropocene as a mode where environmental precarity and the possibilities of life on a damaged earth become the tropes for writing both colonial pasts, but also the futures of the African continent. Reading for eco-futurism in African literatures, I will also link the post-apocalyptical and environmental futurism of recent writers such as Nnedi Okorafor to earlier generations of African writers such as Thomas Mofolo, Bessie Head, and Amos Tutuola, who were equally invested in an ecological imaginary which was itself routed through ontologies of the futuristic, the mythical and the fabulist. Eco-futurism is a way to re-read the history of African literature as deeply invested in mapping ecologies of the continent in which the future might be imagined differently. By looking at earlier expressions of political ecological histories in African writing, I am able to argue for a rethinking and expansion of received genealogies of decolonization on the continent.
Dr Kirk Sides is a Lecturer in World Literatures in English in the Department of English at the University of Bristol.
Header image: Rachel Carson Center
Dr Adrian Howkins, Reader in Environmental History (Bristol), reflects on the new paperback edition of his book, Frozen Empires.
The recent release of the paperback edition of Frozen Empires: An Environmental History of the Antarctic Peninsula, offers an opportunity to revisit the arguments I made in this book and reflect on how it continues to shape my work in Antarctica and thinking about environmental history. The book sets out to frame the mid-twentieth century Antarctic sovereignty dispute among Argentina, Britain, and Chile as an environmental history of decolonization. Through a strategy I refer to as asserting ‘environmental authority’, Britain used the performance of scientific research and the production of useful knowledge to support its imperial claims to the region as a territory known as the ‘Falkland Islands Dependencies’. Argentina and Chile both contested Britain’s claim, and put forward their own assertations to sovereignty based on a sense that this was their environment as a result of proximity, geological contiguity, and shared climate and ecosystems. In the contest between British assertions of environmental authority and Argentine and Chilean ‘environmental nationalism’ it was the imperial, scientific vision of the environment that largely won out. There was no genuine decolonization of the Antarctic Peninsula region, or the Antarctic continent more generally. Instead, the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which remains in force today, retains pre-existing sovereignty claims in a state of suspended animation (‘frozen’ in the pun of the treaty negotiators) and perpetuates the close connection between science and politics across the Antarctic Continent.
Much of my work since researching and writing Frozen Empires has focused on the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys on the opposite side of the Antarctic continent. I am a co-PI on a US National Science Foundation funded Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) project, collaborating with scientists to ask how historical research might inform our understanding of this unique place. The McMurdo Dry Valleys are the largest predominantly ice-free region of Antarctica and since the late 1950s have become an important site of Antarctic science. Geologists are attracted to the Dry Valleys by the exposed rock, geomorphologists by the opportunity to study the glaciological history of the continent, and ecologists by the presence of microscopic ecosystems. The close connection between politics and science that I identified in the Antarctic Peninsula is also applicable to the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys. The two most active countries in the region, New Zealand and the United States, can both be seen as making assertions of environmental authority to support their political position. A major difference is that now I find myself on the inside of this system, working with scientists to help produce the ‘useful information’ that is being used for political purposes.
Working as more of an insider in a system I critiqued in Frozen Empires raises a number of awkward questions. Can I retain a critical distance? Am I contributing to the perpetuation of an unequal system? What might the decolonization of Antarctic research look like? These questions are not easy to answer. Not infrequently I find myself looking back on the lack of inhibition I felt while researching and writing Frozen Empires and wishing for something similar in my current research. Academic collaboration by definition leads to entanglements, and these entanglements increase complexity. It is much easier, for example, to write critically about the imperial history of Antarctica than to convince scientific colleagues that this imperial history continues to have an impact on contemporary scientific research.
But for all the messiness and difficulties involved in collaboration, there are also tremendous opportunities. I have learned a lot about how science gets done through working with the McMurdo Dry Valleys LTER site, and I have learned about working as part of an academic team. Place-based studies offers an ideal opportunity for interdisciplinary research, and I think it is vital to have humanities perspectives represented in these collaborations. It takes time – often more time than expected – for effective collaborations to develop, and this process involves a significant degree of mutual learning. Researching and writing Frozen Empires fundamentally shaped what I bring to the table as an environmental historian in the McMurdo Dry Valleys project, and I remain convinced by its argument for imperial continuity. But the process of engaging in collaborative research has unsettled at least some of my earlier positions, and the book I’m writing on the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys will likely be quite different to Frozen Empires.
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Header image: American base at Stonington Island, by Mark Sykes at Wikimedia Commons
We had exciting news at the CEH this week as publishers Hodder & Stoughton announced they have commissioned Gifts of Gravity and Light: A Nature Almanac for the Twenty-first Century, co-edited by Dr Pippa Marland (Bristol, Department of English) and Anita Roy. The collection features Dr Michael Malay (Bristol, Department of English), alongside some of the most exciting voices in contemporary nature writing.
We’re pleased to share the press release here:
HODDER & STOUGHTON COMMISSIONS ‘A NATURE ALMANAC FOR THE 21ST CENTURY’
Hodder & Stoughton has commissioned Gifts of Gravity and Light: A Nature Almanac for the Twenty-first Century, which will take the reader, season by season, through one year of the natural world in all its biodiversity, as experienced by those who, for reasons of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, upbringing or disability, are not always seen or heard when it comes to nature writing. Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo will write the foreword and the title is taken from a poem by the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage.
These writers come to the natural world from a different place to the ‘traditional’ nature writer, so the reader will see the seasons through new eyes, focusing on details that have perhaps previously gone unnoticed, or finding nature in places we’ve not thought to look before. Whether it’s the seashore or an inner-city street corner, the natural world is a part of our daily lives, just as we are all part of nature.
Hodder & Stoughton acquired world rights and will publish Gifts of Gravity and Light in July 2021.
Hodder Non-Fiction Publisher Rupert Lancaster explains:
‘Nature writing is one of the most popular genres today and yet it is still disproportionately dominated by writers from very similar backgrounds, making it something of a literary monoculture. Anita Roy and Pippa Marland were so positive when I approached them with this idea and are creating something very special. It feels like a book that is needed, so I’m very proud that Hodder is the publisher.’
Editors Anita Roy and Pippa Marland comment:
‘Gifts of Gravity and Light will explore a year of nature in ways that will challenge and inspire the reader to look again at what is around us. We wanted to include authors who are well known, though not necessarily as nature writers, as well as relatively new voices. All are from diverse backgrounds and we believe will offer fresh perspectives in a genre that often feels predictable in all sorts of ways.’
The contributors each write about a season that has a special resonance for them:
SPRING:
Kaliane Bradley is an Anglo-Cambodian writer, editor and dance/theatre critic based in London. Her work has appeared in Catapult, The Willowherb Review, The Tangerine, Somesuch Stories and Granta, among others.
Pippa Marland, co-editor of this collection, writes on the spring equinox (see biog below).
Testament is a Hip Hop MC, beatboxer and the author of the play Black Men Walking, which was inspired by the Sheffield Black Men Walk for Health group and by historical documentation of black walkers in the Peak District centuries ago.
SUMMER:
Michael Malay was shortlisted for the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize. He grew up in Indonesia and Australia and has written for The Clearing and Dark Mountain. He is working on a new book entitled Late Light.
Tishani Doshi is an acclaimed dancer, poet and novelist of mixed Gujarati and Welsh parentage. Her latest poetry collection, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, and her recent novel Small Days and Nights was shortlisted for the RCA Ondaatje Award.
Jay Griffiths is an award-winning author of more than six critically acclaimed books, including Wild: An Elemental Journey. She is a passionate advocate for the living world and the cultures that protect it. She lives in Wales.
AUTUMN:
Luke Turner’s first book, Out of the Woods, was shortlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Prize for nature writing and longlisted for the Polari Prize for first book by an LGBT+ writer. He is co-founder and editor of The Quietus.
Anita Roy, co-editor of this collection, writes on the autumn equinox (see biog below).
Raine Geoghegan is a prize-winning author, poet and story-teller of Welsh, Irish and Romany descent. She has recently explored her Romany heritage in two poetry collections: Apple Water: Povel Panni and they lit fires: lenti hatch o yog.
WINTER:
Zakiya Mckenzie was chosen in 2019 to be a writer-in-residence for Forestry England. A passionate spokeswoman for trees, she was born in London, grew up in Jamaica and now lives in Bristol where she is studying for her PhD.
Alys Fowler is an urban nature writer who combines horticulture, biology and biography in her journalism and in her acclaimed book Hidden Nature, which traces both the Birmingham canals and her coming out as a gay woman.
Amanda Thomson is a Scottish visual artist and writer of who teaches at the Glasgow School of Art. Her vivid collection of words and images, from an owl’s call on a summer’s evening (“huam”) to walking in wet mud (“splorroch”), make up her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature. Her writing has been published in the anthology Antlers of Water, the Willowherb Review and in Gutter magazine.
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Anita Roy is a writer, editor and publisher of mixed British and Indian heritage. She spent twenty years living and working in New Delhi, until returning to the UK in 2015. Her work has appeared in Granta, Guernica, The Clearing and Dark Mountain. She has recently published an acclaimed novel for children and the nature diary A Year at Kingcombe: The Wildflower Meadows of Dorset.
Pippa Marland is an author and academic, whose research focuses on the nature writing genre, especially the representation of small islands and farming communities. Her creative writing draws on her childhood experiences of living in Ghana, Malta, West Wales, and the South of England, as well as her lifelong islomania. Her work has appeared in Earthlines, The Clearing, and the forthcoming Women on Nature.
For more information please contact:
Maria Garbutt-Lucero maria.garbutt-lucero@hodder.co.uk
Hodder & Stoughton, Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment, London EC4Y 0DZ
CEH member Paul Merchant has published new research on the Pacific Ocean in Chilean cinema in the Bulletin of Latin American Research.
”Collecting What the Sea Gives Back’: Postcolonial Ecologies of the Ocean in Contemporary Chilean Film’ addresses the entanglements between ecology and postcolonial politics in the films of Tiziana Panizza and Patricio Guzmán.
The abstract, from BLAR, is:
This article proposes a new mode of understanding the entanglement of ecological and postcolonial questions in contemporary Chilean filmmaking, through the lens of directorial subjectivity. Both Tierra sola (Solitary Land, Tiziana Panizza, 2017), and El botón de nácar (The Pearl Button, Patricio Guzmán, 2015) contest hegemonic structures of belonging by constructing an alternative ‘oceanic archive’. Yet where Guzmán’s metaphorical meditations on indigenous connections to the ocean risk collapsing into romanticism and replicating colonial visuality, Panizza’s reflexive conception of filmmaking as a situated and embodied practice facilitates a subtler understanding of cinema’s political engagement in this sphere.
You can read and download the article here.
Dr Paul Merchant is lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Latin American film and visual culture, with particular emphasis on the countries of the Southern Cone and, more recently, Peru and Bolivia. He has recently completed his first book, Remaking Home: Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015.
Header image credit: Tierra sola (Solitary Land, Tiziana Panizza, 2017)
Aneurin Merrill-Glover, a second-year PhD student at the University of Manchester, introduces his research on the peat mosses of early modern Lancashire. Aneurin’s research is funded by the ESRC North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership. You can follow him on twitter @AMerrillGlover
My PhD focusses on the mossland landscapes of early modern Lancashire; in particular on the mossland Complex around Chat Moss, to the west of Manchester. I’m supervised by Prof. Sasha Handley of the University of Manchester, Dr John Morgan of the University of Bristol, and Mike Longden of the Lancashire Wildlife Trust.
A mossland, or moss, is the name given to a peat bog in the north of England, so named for the distinctive Sphagum genus of mosses which populate the mossland surface. These landscapes underwent transformative change through drainage and ‘improvement’ at the end of the eighteenth century. Approximately two percent of the lowland raised peat bogs of historic Lancashire survive in a salvageable condition. This was devastating for the plant and animal life which inhabited the mosslands, the Lancashire Wildlife Trust are dedicated to rehabilitating the mosslands and their wildlife. The most recent example of this was the Manchester Argus (large heath) butterfly, locally extinct for one hundred and fifty years, which was reintroduced in May of 2020. Such tales of ecological calamity are common sights in the histories of English wetlands. The significantly larger East Anglian Fens and Somerset Levels underwent comparable transformations; and have engendered significantly more scholarly attention. This study thus provides timely regional reservations to narratives of national environmental change. Although the mosslands have been characterised as ‘wasteland’, my thesis is demonstrating that they were productive landscapes for those that lived on them. For instance, the peat which makes up the substance of a bog has been used for millenia as a source of fuel.
The unique wetland landscape fostered unique management practices in the communities which lived on them. A manor court was a local court which resolved small-scale agricultural disputes, and their records are central to my understanding of the historical mossland. Like much of the ‘wasteland’ in early modern England, the mosslands were held in common by the locals. This meant that though they were nominally owned by the Lord of the Manor, the locals retained certain use rights. These rights included the digging of peat, and the pasturing of animals on the mosses, and were regulated by the manor courts. The courts also appointed specialised officers to ensure that the mossland landscape was being properly maintained, known as ‘moss reeves’. The large amount of standing water on the mosslands acted as a spur to cooperative action, and much of the moss reeves’ time was spent ensuring that peat diggings were filled back in, and drainage ditches were maintained. The majority of literature on historical commons has been preoccupied with their role in gating access to a resource, or determining the level of that access. This finding thus demonstrates the power of adding an environmental dimension to historical inquiry.
These manorial court records make up the main body of my source base for this doctorate, and they provide a useful insight into the lowest level of legal dispute resolution in early modern England. Occasionally, they even offer slightly amusing narratives of flagrant illegality. A William Cheetham found himself before a Worsley court in 1688 for unlicensed construction of a shippon [cattle shed] on an area of common land. This was a crime in and of itself, however a family member, Richard Cheetham was also presented in front of that court. Richard’s crime was ‘pulinge downe a shippon & Selling the wood onto William Cheetham & haveing noe License or Leave soe to doe’. This family scheme to steal an entire shed would be appalling were it not so deliciously ambitious. Protecting the integrity of common land from unauthorised encroachments was a key component of the court’s role, and symptomatic of its role in ensuring that the collective interest was prioritised over the individual.
A bog is an anathema to our classificatory order ‘predicated on a […] distinction between land and sea’
My PhD is the fruit of a partnership between the University of Manchester and the modern-day custodians of the mosslands, the Lancashire Wildlife Trust. As the modern-day custodians of the mosslands, the Lancashire Wildlife Trust want to use the historical dimension to engage local communities with the importance and fragility of the mossland landscape. The LWT face vandalism on many of their sites, for instance through destruction of fencing, illegal off-roading, illicit agriculture, and arson. Putting these issues into historical context may help to ameliorate these strained relationships. Further, in order to reintroduce a species to the mosslands, the LWT are often required to provide evidence that the species inhabited the landscape historically. An environmental history of the mossland landscape is uniquely positioned to assist with this. The partnership also gives me unique opportunities to go out and work on the mosses myself. This gave me access to the extensive knowledge and experience of the LWT staff and volunteers, which has been invaluable in developing my understandings of the historical mossland. Finally, first-hand experience of the mosses has also helped me to develop my understanding of the unintuitive mechanics of a wetland. A bog is an anathema to our classificatory order ‘predicated on a […] distinction between land and sea’, in Rod Giblett’s irresistible phrase.[i] Being out on the mosses helped me to begin to subvert this dichotomy, which is a key step in imagining any wetland, historical or otherwise.
[i] Rod Giblett, Postmodern wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 4.
Dr Ed Atkins of the School of Geographical Sciences has just published a new book on hydropower in Brazil. Contesting Hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon is published by Routledge in their Routledge Studies in Sustainability series.
From the Routledge website:
In Contesting Hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon, Ed Atkins focuses on how local, national, and international civil society groups have resisted the Belo Monte and São Luiz do Tapajós hydroelectric projects in Brazil. In doing so, Atkins explores how contemporary opposition to hydropower projects demonstrate a form of ‘contested sustainability’ that highlights the need for sustainable energy transitions to take more into account than merely greenhouse gas emissions.
The assertion that society must look to successfully transition away from fossil fuels and towards sustainable energy sources often appears assured in contemporary environmental governance. However, what is less certain is who decides which forms of energy are deemed ‘sustainable.’ Contesting Hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon explores one process in which the sustainability of a ‘green’ energy source is contested. It focuses on how civil society actors have both challenged and reconfigured dominant pro-dam assertions that present the hydropower schemes studied as renewable energy projects that contribute to sustainable development agendas. The volume also examines in detail how anti-dam actors act to render visible the political interests behind a project, whilst at the same time linking the resistance movement to wider questions of contemporary environmental politics.
This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable development, sustainable energy transitions, environmental justice, environmental governance, and development studies.
Description from Routledge
Ed wrote about the themes of the book in a piece for The Conversation. You can read ‘Belo Monte: there is nothing green or sustainable about these mega-dams’ here.
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Redesigning Hydrology
Chapter 3: Damming the Amazon
Chapter 4: ‘By hook or by crook’
Chapter 5: Belo Monstro
Chapter 6: “A country that cannot live with difference”
Chapter 7: Refusing to Celebrate Victory
Chapter 8: Final Remarks
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
Dr Ed Atkins is a Lecturer in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. You can find his published work here, and follow him on twitter @edatkins_
Header image: International Rivers on Flickr
Dr Sue Edney, Senior Associate in the Department of English, has just published her new book with Manchester University Press, EcoGothic gardens in the long nineteenth century: Phantoms, fantasy and uncanny flowers.
We’re delighted to share the details of the book here, along with a podcast Sue put together for Manchester University Press.
From the MUP website:
EcoGothic gardens in the long nineteenth century provides fresh approaches to contemporary ecocritical and environmental debates, providing new, compelling insights into material relationships between vegetal and human beings. Through twelve exciting essays, the collection demonstrates how unseen but vital relationships among plants and their life systems can reflect and inform human behaviours and actions. In these entertaining essays, human and vegetal agency is interpreted through ecocritical and ecoGothic investigation of uncanny manifestations in gardens – hauntings, psychic encounters, monstrous hybrids, fairies and ghosts – with plants, greenhouses, granges, mansions, lakes, lawns, flowerbeds and trees as agents and sites of uncanny developments. The collection represents the forefront of ecoGothic critical debate and will be welcomed by specialists in environmental humanities at every level, as a timely, innovative inclusion in ecoGothic studies.
Table of contents
Introduction: Phantoms, fantasy and uncanny flowers – Sue Edney
1. Deadly gardens: The ‘Gothic green’ in Goethe and Eichendorff – Heather I. Sullivan
2. ‘Diabolic clouds over everything’: An ecoGothic reading of John Ruskin’s garden at Brantwood – Caroline Ikin
3. The Gothic orchard of the Victorian imagination – Joanna Crosby
4. Gothic Eden: Gardens, religious tradition and ecoGothic exegesis in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Lost Valley’ and ‘The Transfer’ – Christopher M. Scott
5. ‘That which roars further out’: Gardens and wilderness in ‘The Man who Went too Far’ by E. F. Benson and ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ by Algernon Blackwood – Ruth Heholt
6. Darwin’s plants and Darwin’s gardens: Sex, sensation and natural selection – Jonathan Smith
7. ‘Tentacular thinking’ and the ‘abcanny’ in Hawthorne’s Gothic gardens of masculine egotism – Shelley Saguaro
8. Green is the new black: Plant monsters as ecoGothic tropes; vampires and femme fatales – Teresa Fitzpatrick
9. Death and the fairy: Hidden gardens and the haunting of childhood – Francesca Bihet
10. Presence and absence in Tennyson’s gardens of grief: ‘Mariana’, Maud and Somersby – Sue Edney
11. Blackwater Park and the haunting of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White – Adrian Tait
Afterword: Z Vesper, the Wilderness Garden, Powis Castle – Paul Evans
