Description: Focusing on the concept of "dark ecology" and its invitation to add an anti-pastoral perspective to ecocriticism, this collection of essays on American literature and culture offers examples of how a vision of nature's darker side can create a fuller understanding of humanity's relation to nature.
Brief description: Isabel Galleymore is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham, UK. She publishes on contemporary ecopoetry. Her first collection of poems is Significant Other (2019).
Review Quotes:
"Dark Nature [is a] signicant [contribution] to the existing scholarship on ecology and nature, for [it] explore[s] what we tend to characterize as the horrors of the natural world that, in turn, are impossible to neglect today, when the planet's climate is changing so drastically. [This book] prove[s] the necessity of ecocriticism to concentrate on nature's darkness, and not just on its pastoralism. Only having fully understood nature as both light and dark, welcoming and abhorring, comforting and punishing, humanity will be able to conceive of its own role in the natural world and view the environment as a living and constantly changing organism. . . Dark Nature will thus be of interest to scholars and students in environmental humanities as well as to general audiences who want to understand the duality of nature and why it is so important to know about and accept nature's darkness." --Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture
"Building on Timothy Morton's concept of 'dark ecology, ' Richard Schneider, a leading Thoreau scholar, has assembled a wide-ranging collection of essays that explore an American literary tradition of disturbing, sinister, and fearful encounters with nature. These 'anti-pastoral' writings provide new perspectives on the continually expanding discourse of ecocriticism." --David M. Robinson, Oregon State University, Author of Natural Life: Thoreau's Worldly Transcendentalism "Offering smart treatments of nature's disinterest, disease, and horrors, these canon-busting essays on both historical and contemporary print and non-print media jolt ecocriticism away from any remaining tendency to rest in pastoral idealism." --Rochelle Johnson, College of Idaho