Search Results (58)

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

Forests and forestry have been recurrent topics in Finnish environmental poetry since the 1970s, reflecting the importance of the cultural meanings of forests and forest-related livelihoods in Finland. Despite the recent forest boom in Finnish contemporary art and literature, contemporary sylvan poetics in Finnish poetry has remained an understudied topic. Moreover, the wider ecocritical discussions on the artistic and poetic dimensions of forest management and economy are still scarce, at least in the Nordic cultural context. To ignite these discussions, this study examines the meanings of forest clearings in contemporary Finnish poetry. Theoretically, this study draws from ecocriticism, with a particular emphasis on ecopoetics. By focusing on typography, rhetorics and thematics, this article shows how forest poems written by Jouni Tossavainen, Janette Hannukainen and Mikael Brygger combine technical forestry terminology with affective language and visual means to express anthropogenic changes in forests, resulting in a specific expressive style conceptualised as the poetics of lack. This poetics consists of ideas and rhetorical and typographical elements that together denote and express a variety of experiences, emotions and thoughts regarding a lack of trees, as well as a lack of natural organisation in forest growth. Full article

This article examines Percival Everett’s 2005 novel Wounded through three applications of the word “naturalistic” in order to show how the work complicates divisions between nature and man and man and animal. First, the article shows how its protagonist, John Hunt, contends with his relationship to nature as both a source of respite and as part of his livelihood as a horse trainer. Next, “naturalistic” elements of Wounded reveal how the mythic West of classic Westerns has influenced perspectives on the “real” West. Finally, the article assesses Wounded as a work of American literary naturalism, particularly in terms of the questions it inspires about free will and determinism. Together, these applications of the word “naturalistic” expose how nature acts as John’s barometer for human morality and individualism, forcing us to question whether man is truly superior over nature. Full article

Starting with European colonization, African natural resources in particular and nature in general have been coveted and exploited mainly in the interest of Euro-American industrialized countries, with China as a recent major player from Asia. Interestingly, the incessant quest by some Western NGOs, institutions, and governments to protect and conserve African nature not only are inspired by ecological and climatic concerns but also often tend to propagate a false image of Africa as the last Eden of the earth in order to control Africa’s resources. Using literary texts, this article argues that some Euro-American transnational NGOs and some of their governments sometimes conspire with some African governments to spread global capitalism and green colonialism under the pretext of oxymoronic sustainable development as they attempt to conserve a mythical African Eden. Utilizing three novels and one play from the Congo Basin, namely In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc.: Le Testament de Bismarck (2014), Assitou Ndinga’s Les Marchands du développement durable (2006), Étienne Goyémidé’s Le Silence de la forêt ([1984] 2015), and Ekpe Inyang’s The Last Hope (2011), I contend that such Euro-American environmental NGOs and their governments sometimes impose and sustain fortress conservation (creation of protected areas) in the Congo Basin as a hidden means of coopting Africa’s nature and Africans into neoliberal capitalism. For the most part, instead of protecting the Congo Basin, green colonialists and developmentalists sell sustainable development, undermine alternative ways of achieving human happiness, and perpetuate epistemicide, thus leading to poverty and generating resentment among local and indigenous populations. As these literary texts suggest, nature conservation and sustainable development in the Congo Basin should not be imposed upon from the outside; they should emanate from Africans, tapping into local expertise, and indigenous and other knowledge systems. Full article

This article explores the connections between film and ruderal plants: plants that grow spontaneously in anthropized environments and that we often call “weeds”. Thriving across damaged lands, ruderals are not only exceptional companions for thinking with at a time of ecological rupture, but also a way of engaging with less anthropocentric histories. As argued in this paper, such histories also pertain to film. Despite its timid representational interest in ruderals and “weeds”, cinema is concerned with the stories of collaborative survival, companionship and contaminated diversity raised by such turbulent creatures. Framed by a reflection on our ruderal condition, a discussion around some recent artists’ films allows us to explore some of these problems, while putting an accent on the idea of affective ecologies and involutionary modes of perception. Full article