Description: This book explores the range of ecocriticism. Purposefully it swerves into advocacy, anthropology, bioregionalism, environmental history, politics, rhetoric, visual arts, and other neglected areas that make for freer theorizing and more original critical designs.
Review Quotes:
"[The author's] chapters cut across genres and fields of research, including literary analysis, cultural critique, advocacy for activism, and pedagogy. . . .Repeatedly, Lindholdt has the good sense to answer the question a reader might ask: so what? One is never in doubt that what these writers, such as John Josselyn, William Wood, and William Bartram, published is relevant for us to analyze today." --ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
"Lindholdt has given us a strong new collection that stretches the conceptual boundaries of ecocriticism.... Explorations represents a laudable addition to Lexington Books' recent ecocriticism series. The three terms of his subtitle explain the collection's innovation, for the unexpected connections between advocacy, bioregionalism, and visual design demonstrate his reach into less familiar territory. Lindholdt's wide, comfortable interdisciplinarity is commendable.... Perhaps Lindholdt's most innovative work concerns his subversive reading of the Bureau of Reclamation's commissioned art collection (1968-73), now dispersed and incomplete, through the conceptual lens of ecopornography. Here is a story few know, and his ecocritical undressing of this propagandistic initiative by a federal agency most known for out-of-control dam building persuasively exposes its agenda. The essay illustrates Lindholdt's diverse, innovative paths, and Explorations inspires readers to further their own." --Western American Literature "Following his very well received volume of autobiographical ecocriticism, In Earshot of Water, Paul Lindholdt delivers this new collection of scholarly ecocriticism--deeply researched, beautifully written, and no less comprehensive and compelling. Ranging from colonial natural histories to the reformist sabotage by contemporary eco-warriors, he surprises again and again with his revisionary insights into America's ongoing exploitation of the land." --Harold Fromm, University of Arizona "This is a passionate, well written account of the manifold underpinnings of environmental thought, one which re-energizes and re-vivifies the strengths and possibilities of ecocriticism.It is up-to-date, thoughtful, and displays a great depth of scholarship while conveying the urgency and complexity of the environmental dilemmas facing us." --Rebecca Raglon, University of British Columbia "Lindholdt contributes to the sea-change of literary activism. As scholarly and personal voices merge, he finds a way to profess, to compel an audience, to persist. From early American ecologies to ecopornography, he gives us a book that matters." --Aaron M. Moe, author of Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry