Description:
This book brings together research on Shakespeare, biosemiotics, ecocriticism, epigenetics and actor network theory as it explores the space between nature and narrative in an effort to understand how human bodies are stories told in the emergent language of evolution, and how those bodies became storytellers themselves.
Review Quotes:
In this beautiful work of narrative scholarship, Ryan Day succeeds in probing both the intimate and planetary dimensions of green Shakespeare studies and environmental humanities theory. Shakespeare and the Evolution of the Human Umwelt is an impressively learned and engaging book, demonstrating the unexpected relevance of Shakespeare to a wide range of contemporary environmental writing and the vibrant potential of ecocriticism.
--Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, author of Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility
In rich thoughtful prose, Shakespeare and the Evolution of the Human Umwelt sets us deep with Ovid in the roots of our literary heritage, lifts us high in leafy outgrowths of Shakespeare and our shared critical consciousness, and leaves us desolate in the hard-wired wasteland of Atwood's post-apocalyptic Oryx and Crake.
--Andrew J. Power, University of Sharjah, Co-Editor, Early Shakespeare, 1588-1594 and Late Shakespeare, 1608-1613 . Editor, The Birth and Death of the Author: a Multi-authored History of Authorship in Print (Routledge, 2020).
This elegant and accomplished exercise in interwoven narrative history draws fascinating parallels between literature and biology--from the butterflies of Barbara Kingsolver to tumors in The Tempest--and yet it ultimately delivers, with surprising prescience, an entirely new way of thinking about the present.
--Rachel Corbett, author of You Must Change your Life: the Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin