Search Results (62)

This paper reconfigures the theme of divine encounters in the literature by examining the intersection of pantheism, vitalism, and ecological imagination, with a particular focus on Percy Bysshe Shelley. Far from depicting the divine as transcendent, Shelley envisions it as an immanent force permeating nature, matter, and life itself. In poems such as “Queen Mab”, “Mont Blanc”, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, “Ode to the West Wind”, or “The Cloud” Shelley translates vitalist science into poetic vision, challenging orthodox religious beliefs and contemplating the divine as inherent in natural processes. The study also situates Shelley’s thought within a broader genealogy that extends through John Ruskin’s vitalist aesthetics, Henri Bergson’s élan vital, and into contemporary posthumanist philosophy, neomaterialism and ecocriticism, along with scholars who have contributed to reviving and transforming vitalist traditions, reframing human-nonhuman relations in the Anthropocene. The paper shows the importance of the Romantic period in the development of vitalist approaches in various fields of knowledge, anticipating ecological concerns. The study is framed as a genealogical and epistemological problem attempting to articulate connections while situating poetic practice as a privileged site where vitalism is negotiated. Full article

This article critically examines the conceptual boundaries and applications of the terms biocultural and ecocultural in interdisciplinary research addressing biodiversity threats in rural communities. The aim is to clarify their meanings and propose recommendations for their use in sustainability science. We conducted an integrative conceptual review combining a narrative literature analysis and corpus linguistics methods on 54 documents across four disciplinary areas: Ecology and Biodiversity Conservation, Economics and Heritage, Ecocriticism and Literature, and Sociocultural Discourses. The narrative synthesis explores theoretical interpretations, while the corpus analysis quantifies term frequency and collocations to identify patterns of use. The results reveal that biocultural perspectives emphasise species-focused interactions, traditional knowledge, rights, ecoethics, and governance, whereas ecocultural approaches foreground discourse, communication, identity, education, and long-term ecological processes. Both frameworks converge in their concern for sustainability and cultural–ecological interdependence but differ in scope and temporal depth. This study contributes scientifically by offering a situated, interdisciplinary analysis of these concepts, and socially by underscoring the need for dialogical frameworks that respect local knowledge and expand applications beyond rural contexts to urban, educational, and policy domains. Recommendations are provided to guide interdisciplinary teams in adopting context-specific conceptualizations for research and action. Full article

This article examines Daniel Suarez’s techno-thrillers Daemon (2006) and Freedom™ (2010) as works of speculative fiction that critically engage with themes of posthuman identity, algorithmic governance, and ecological agency. Rather than portraying artificial intelligence as a dystopian threat, the novels imagine the Daemon, which is a self-replicating system launched upon its creator’s death, as an infrastructural force that reorganizes global systems of power, labor, and survival. Through a posthumanist reading, drawing on thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, and N. Katherine Hayles, this article interprets the Daemon not as malevolent code, but as an ecological actor embedded in material networks, capable of fostering adaptive forms of life and governance. By reading Suarez’s fiction through the lens of posthuman ecocriticism and infrastructural media theory, the article offers a model for understanding freedom, not as a static right, but as a relational capacity earned through participation in sympoietic systems. It argues that speculative fiction can function as a cartographic tool, mapping not only future technologies but future ontologies. Full article

Scholarship on representations of sonic events in the medieval world has often focused on literary productions, analysing the ways in which texts describe sounds and their effects with words. What has not been thoroughly examined is the relationship between such literary representations and their manifestations in material culture, most prominently in the form of manuscript images. Employing a combined approach drawing from neurobiological predictive processing and Liam Lewis’s framework of the ‘sound milieu’, this article examines representations of sonic events in British Library, Harley MS Y.6, which pictorially depicts the life of St Guthlac in 18 roundels, in conversation with textual depictions in various vitae of the saint. Through this analysis, the article demonstrates that early medieval images were encountered multimodally, with sound milieus created from the sonic information in illustrations allowing an immersive interaction with subjects like St Guthlac. Full article

This article explores Greco-Roman mythology through the lens of ecocriticism, focusing on how sacred landscapes and natural elements were imagined as animate, divine, and morally instructive forces. In ancient Mediterranean cultures, nature was not merely a passive setting for human action but a dynamic presence—rivers that judged, groves that punished, and mountains that sheltered or revealed. Texts such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Virgil’s Georgics, and Homer’s epics present nature as both sacred and sentient, often intervening in human affairs through transformation, vengeance, or protection. Forests, springs, and coastlines functioned as thresholds between human and divine, civilization and wilderness, mortal and eternal. By analyzing these representations, this article reveals a rich tradition in which nature teaches, punishes, guides, and transforms, long before ecological consciousness became a formalized discipline. Drawing connections between classical literary landscapes and contemporary environmental concerns, the article argues that myth can inform today’s ecological imagination, offering an alternative to extractive, anthropocentric paradigms. Recovering the reverence and narrative agency once granted to nature in classical thought may help us rethink our ethical relationship with the environment in the age of climate crisis. Full article

This article proposes a close reading of Rivers Solomon’s 2019 novella The Deep, a recent eco-story about water, memory, and survival. Solomon’s work is inspired by a song called “The Deep” from experimental hip-hop group clipping, a dark science fiction tale about the underwater-dwelling descendants of African women thrown off slave ships during the Middle Passage. This imaginative alternate history, or counter-mythology, was invented by the Detroit techno band Drexciya, which, in a series of releases between 1992 and 2002, tells us the story of an underwater realm in the mid-Atlantic, where merpeople and their descendants establish a utopian society in the sea, free from the war and racism on the surface. My analysis uses Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” to make productive sense of the gaps in the archive of trans-Atlantic slavery that silence the voices of enslaved women, listening to the voices of water to imagine not only what was but also what could be. Moreover, this article examines The Deep through a trajectory that moves from the ocean as a space that reproduces death only to the ocean as a generative force for posthuman and multispecies kinship. Using Black hydrocriticism, hydrofeminism, and econarratology, I will argue that this transition is made possible by the “despatialization” of the ocean—a concept introduced by Erin James—where the ocean is conceived not as a fixed or stable environment, but as a space in constant flux, defying stability, and the subsequent immersion in its waters. Full article

Ecocritical children’s literature research in the 2020s focuses on eco-activism, especially climate activism. Although the causes of activism have changed, different kinds of dissent are still relevant. This article focuses on Mika Wickström’s novel Vastakarvaan (Against the Grain, published in 2002), which describes a young Finnish student’s ethical dilemma: her eco-anarchist friends are planning an attack on a fur farm that the protagonist’s family owns. It evaluates the novel with new theoretical insights from affective ecocriticism and narrative empathy, and the main concepts that have been explored are youth activism and types of dissent. The analysis is grounded in the concept of strategic empathy, exploring the ways in which emotions and ethical decisions of the protagonist are represented in physical, social, and temporal settings: how types of dissent are presented and how bounded strategic empathy, ambassadorial strategic empathy, and broadcast strategic empathy are presented. The analysis demonstrates how the protagonist’s dilemma is emphasized in different stages of dissent: her decision to participate in the attack or not is debated on different levels of narration. Full article

This article posits that a fictional eco-rebel might be not just a human (child or young adult), but also a plant, revolting against the destruction of its dwelling place. The argument is furthered by way of a literary analysis of arboreal agency in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, building on perspectives from critical plant studies. Departing from a closer look at the etymological roots of the term “eco-rebel”, the article highlights previous work on plants in Tolkien’s epic, with an emphasis on trees, before engaging in close reading and analysis of three instances of arboreal hostility and rebellion in The Lord of the Rings. Ultimately, the article argues that Tolkien has created a novel kind of eco-rebel, with a basis in his acknowledgement of plant agency. Full article

Employing assemblage theory, this article furthers the ecocriticism of Jewett’s works by exploring the complex ecological network of humans, the natural environment, and nonhumans created in The Country of the Pointed Firs. This article argues that the novel dismantles traditional dichotomies, such as culture/nature, self/outer environment, and human/nonhuman, and presents these categories as part of a dynamic, interconnected ecological assemblage. The analysis examines three aspects of the assemblage in the novel: first, the assemblage of nature and culture; second, the assemblage of human and nonhuman; and third, the dynamics, contingencies, and uncertainties of the ecological assemblage. This study concludes that though written at the end of the 19th century, The Country of the Pointed Firs anticipates contemporary ideas of assemblage theory, demonstrating its enduring relevance to contemporary ecocritical discourse. Full article

This paper aims to map out the transformations in contemporary performance art during the current ‘age of extinction’. The first section extends Claire Bishop’s notion of “delegated performance” in order to categorize a turn towards the inclusion of other-than-human entities in the performance field. This operation leads to the concept of ‘performative animism’, referring to the strategies of re-animation of reality through artistic performance. The second section works out the idea of ‘planetarization’ of the performance field, which designates its opening to spatial and temporal fluxes coming from a dimension that overcomes the scale of human experience, that is, the planetary dimension. The third and final section interprets the meaning of these two transformations by introducing the concepts of ‘exbodiment’ and ‘excarnation’, which tie closely to a new political task for performance art. Full article

Ecocriticism is an advancing field in literature that has opened up avenues in reading world literature from a whole new perspective. This paper seeks to flesh out ecocritical concerns in the selected poems of Mahmoud Darwish and Naomi Shihab Nye by using selected concepts of the theory of ecocriticism given by Greg Garrard: pastoral, wilderness, and the sublime. An analysis of the poetry by the selected writers, sharing their roots from the Arab world, reveals their agenda of using nature as a trope in the form of resistance to colonialism. The writers give a glimpse of the people of their homeland and their culture imbued in nature. Full article

After a decade of dormancy following the release of Tōhō Studios’ Godzilla: Final Wars (2004), Godzilla and other kaijū burst back onto the scene with Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla (2014). Several American sequels and a television series set in Legendary’s MonsterVerse quickly followed over the next ten years. Meanwhile, Japan’s Tōhō used their radioactive creation’s global success to reignite their own films with Shin Godzilla (2016), an animated trilogy, and Godzilla Minus One (2023). Short-format media like Chibi Godzilla and Godziban also circulated thanks to streaming services. Similarly, Godzilla’s longtime competitor Gamera also emerged from hibernation in an animated series produced by Kadokawa Corporation, Gamera Rebirth (2023). But how do these new installations relate to or depart from their predecessors’ predilection to address environmental concerns? This article continues the ecocritical analysis of kaijū eiga, expanding it to the 2010s and 2020s, as a coda to our duograph Japan’s Green Monsters (2018). This article picks up where we left off, examining the recent releases from an ecocritical standpoint. This analysis reveals that today’s films remain steeped in environmental commentary, but both fragmented and updated for the new concerns of the twenty-first century. Full article

The female body is often depicted in parallel with the environment in many literary works. This article examines how the female body can prompt a rethinking of the environment by analyzing three literary works, Mo Yan’s Feng ru Fei tun, published in 1996 Murakami Haruki’s Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru, published in 1994-1995, and Gabriel García Márquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera, published in 1985, which root in Chinese, Japanese, and Latin American cultures, respectively. This paper argues that, on the one hand, the female body parallels the environment by displaying non-human characteristics and relating to natural elements in these three works; on the other hand, it deconstructs the boundary between the environment and humans by playing a crucial role in constructing human identity. This paper draws on theories of posthumanism, material feminism, and ecofeminism to explore the depiction of the female body and its role in rethinking the environment. The cultural hybridity of local and non-local worldviews—a key reason for situating this study within a transnational comparative framework—serves as a crucial element in demonstrating how the female body bridges the environment and human identity across all three works. This analysis aims to deconstruct the anthropocentric perspective on the environment, thereby rethinking the role of the female body in this context. Full article

This article investigates two recent novels that deal with environmental and pandemic disasters: Severance (2018) by Ling Ma and Under the Blue (2022) by Oana Aristide. The analysis is based on ecocritical and posthumanist perspectives and on a division made by Chakrabarty (Planetary Crises and the Difficulty of Being Modern), in two different understandings of the globe: one connected to the planetary-focused discourse on global warming and the other on human-centered globalization. The clashes of these discourses are highlighted in the novels. They illustrate a process of understanding that humans are not separate from the natural world, through the disease itself and through the sudden need to survive without modern healthcare and all the comfort we are used to being able to buy. The gradual insight of the depicted characters, and perhaps also the readers of the novels, is that we live on a planet of extreme complexity and interdependence. Full article

In Posthuman Ecology, anthropocentrism, based on the binary division between the privileged human and the ‘other’, gets deconstructed, leading to an acknowledgment of humans as essentially tangled in an intricate web of the natural world. In such ecologies, boundaries between the human and the more-than-human (non-human) worlds become porous, creating fluid identities and conditions of being within a framework of active interplay between the human and the non-human world. The ecology of folktales is replete with Posthumanism, as their narratives consistently break the unbridgeable gap between the human, non-human, and the spiritual and/or supernatural worlds and present certain non-naturalist ontologies that are mostly at odds with naturalism or modern empirical science. Such tales provided much-needed templates for sustainable development in the time of the Anthropocene. This paper attempts to study Easterine Kire’s When the River Sleeps (2014) as a posthumanist narrative where Vilie (a hunter) goes on a fantastical journey to find a fabled magical stone from the bottom of the ‘sleeping river’. Vilie’s journey comes out as a playground for both mundane and fantastic elements. He grows as a human being, and this happens as he transacts with the non-human and the supernatural world and comes across deep metaphysical questions and presents keys to understanding balance-in-transcendence. Full article