The literary field of ecocriticism appraises texts from the perspective of the natural world, its biosystems, its animals (human and otherwise), and its ecological interconnections. Exploring a range of contemporary American novelists whose narratives resonate with numerous ecological challenges, this work examines humankind’s relationship with the environment in the context of Judeo-Christian theological views. It demonstrates how characters from novels such as John Updike’s Rabbit Run, DeLillo’s White Noise, Toni Morrison’s Paradise, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road take neopastoral journeys to rediscover an innovative relationship with nature and religion. While some are successful, others turn away from the landscape’s spirituality, retreating into technological inventions. The journeys of these fictional American heroes, this volume shows, mirror ongoing, theological, nuclear age convictions.

Cormac McCarthy's work is attracting an increasing number of scholars and critics from a range of disciplines within the humanities and beyond, from political philosophy to linguistics and from musicology to various branches of the sciences. Cormac McCarthy's Borders and Landscapes contributes to this developing field of research, investigating the way McCarthy's writings speak to other works within the broader fields of American literature, international literature, border literature, and other forms of comparative literature. It also explores McCarthy's literary antecedents and the movements out of which his work has emerged, such as modernism, romanticism, naturalism, eco-criticism, genre-based literature (western, southern gothic), folkloric traditions and mythology.

Ecocriticism bezeichnet aktuelle kultur- und literaturwissenschaftliche Ansätze, die die Beziehungen zwischen dem Menschen und seiner Umwelt sowie ihre Transformationen in der Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte untersuchen. Der Band stellt ausführlich die Geschichte des Eocriticism sowie unterschiedliche theoretische Herangehensweisen vor. Der Autor bietet den Abriss einer ökologischen Literaturgeschichte vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zu den Dystopien der Gegenwart mit Interpretationen zentraler Werke. Der Schlussteil sucht die poetologischen Dimensionen des Themas auf und ergründet Narrative (wie Zurück zur Natur ), Räume (wie Wildnis und Naturpark), Störungen (wie Verschmutzungen und Klimawandel) und nicht-menschliche Akteure (wie Tiere und Maschinen).

By recognizing the groundbreaking work of many non-Italian ecocritics, and linking to the homegrown contributions of Serenella Iovino, Marco Armerio, and Giovanna Ricoveri, the authors of Ecocritical Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature: The Denatured Wild, challenge the narrowly defined conventions of Italian Studies and illuminate the complexities of an Italian ecocriticism that reveals a rich environmentally engaged literary and cultural tradition.

Shamanism, Discourse, Modernity considers indigenous peoples’ struggles for human rights, anxieties about anthropocentric mastery of nature, neoliberal statecraft, and entrepreneurialism of the self. The book focuses on four domains - shamanism, indigenism, environmentalism and neoliberalism - in terms of interrelated historical processes and overlapping discourses. In doing so, it engages with shamanism’s manifold meanings in a world increasingly sensitive to indigenous peoples’ practices of territoriality, increasingly concerned about humans’ integral relationship with natural environments, and increasingly encouraged and coerced to adjust self-conduct to comport with and augment government conduct.