Further reading
Introduction
General sources
Journals
Useful non-literary journals: Environmental Ethics; Environmental Politics; Environmental Values.
General critical anthologies
Armbruster, Karla, and Kathleen R. Wallace (eds.), Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).
Branch, Michael P., and Scott Slovic (eds.), The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993–2003 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003).
Bryson, J. Scott (ed.), Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002).
Coupe, Lawrence (ed.), The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2000).
Gersdorf, Catrin, and Sylvia Mayer (eds.), Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006).
Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm (eds.), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).
Ingram, Annie Merril, et al. (eds.), Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).
Kerridge, Richard, and Neil Sammells (eds.), Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature (London: Zed Books, 1998).
Murphy, Patrick D. (ed.), Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998). Especially useful for its international range.
Tallmadge, John, and Henry Harrington (eds.), Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000).
Other useful overviews
Buell, Lawrence, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2005).
Garrard, Greg, Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2004).
Heise, Ursula K., ‘Greening English: Recent Introductions to Ecocriticism’, Contemporary Literature 47.2 (2006): 289–98.
Definitions of ‘nature’
Soper, Kate, What is Nature? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
Williams, Raymond, Keywords (London: Flamingo, 1993).
Williams Raymond. ‘Ideas of Nature’, in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1996), 67–85.
Worster, Donald, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Climate change
Behringer, Wolfgang, A Cultural History of Climate, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2010). A suggestive if necessarily rather speculative account of effects of changes in climate upon mainly European cultural history
over the millennia.
Bhaskar, Roy, et al. (eds.), Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change (London: Routledge, 2010).
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35 (winter 2009): 197–222.
Cohen, Tom, and Claire Colebrook (eds.), ‘Critical Climate Change’, a forthcoming open access book series on climate change in the humanities with Open Humanities
Press. See openhumanities.org
Shearman, David, and Joseph Wayne Smith, The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007). On how climate change forms a crisis as to the legitimacy of dominant forms of government and economics, especially liberal
democracy.
Romantic and anti-romantic
The two most sustained critiques of modern ecocriticism to date both focus on its romanticism:
Morton, Timothy, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
Phillips, Dana, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (Oxford University Press, 2003).
1 Old world romanticism
Bate, Jonathan (ed.), Green Romanticism, special issue of Studies in Romanticism 35.3 (1996).
Hutchings, Kevin, ‘Ecocriticism in British Romantic Studies’, Literature Compass 4.1 (2007): 172–202. A detailed and comprehensive survey, especially strong on the issues of animal rights in the romantic period and new developments such as attention to ‘urban ecology’ in the London of Leigh Hunt and Thomas de Quincey.
McKusick, James C., Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St Martin's, 2000).
Morton, Timothy, ‘Environmentalism’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford University Press, 2004), 696–707.
‘Deep ecology’
Drengson, Alan, and Yuichi Inoue (eds.), The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995).
Luke, Timothy W., ‘
Deep Ecology as Political Philosophy’,
Chapter 1 of his
Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture (
Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press,
1997). Very critical.
Salleh, Ariel, ‘Class, Race, and Gender Discourse in the Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology Debate’, in Max Oelschalager (ed.), Postmodern Environmental Ethics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995).
Zimmerman, Michael, Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Assesses debates between ‘deep ecology’, ‘social ecology’ and ecofeminism.
2 New world romanticism
Abrams, Robert E., ‘Image, Object, and Perception in Thoreau's Landscapes: The Development of Anti-Geography’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 46 (1991): 245–62.
Cranston, C. A., and
Robert Zeller (eds.),
The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers (
Amsterdam:
Rodopi,
2007). As Libby Robbin observes in a review, ‘Neither the transcendental romantic wilderness view (the American canon) nor the
pastoral romantic (the classic British genre) work for the
Australian landscape and its peoples’:
Australian Humanities Review 42 (August 2007),
www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-August-2007/EcoHumanities/Robin.html#book
Cronon, William, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, in William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1995). A seminal and in its time very controversial attack on romantic and evasive conceptions of ‘wilderness’ in US culture.
Mazel, Don, American Literary Environmentalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000). On the wilderness ‘mystique’ and how conceptions of the environment in the US reflect an often nationalist cultural politics.
Petrulionis, Sandra Harbert, and Laura Dassow Walls (eds.), More Day to Dawn: Thoreau's Walden for the Twenty-First Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007).
Scheese, Don, Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America (New York: Twayne, 1996).
Wilson, Eric, Romantic Turbulence: Chaos, Ecology and American Space (New York: St Martin's, 2000). Locates American Romantic writers (mainly Emerson, Fuller, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman) in the historical development of
ecological consciousness, with consideration of the literary forms read as enacting such understanding.
3 Genre and the question of non-fiction
Farber, Paul Lawrence, Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
Gifford, Terry, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999). A study of the various senses and histories of the genre.
Morris, David Copland, ‘Inhumanism, Environmental Crisis, and the Canon of American Literature’, ISLE 4.2 (autumn 1997): 1–16. ‘Inhumanism’ names the stance or discipline, mainly associated with the poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962), of affirming views of life that resist a human-centred perspective.
Selzer, Jack (ed.), Understanding Scientific Prose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). Innovative essays analyse the discourse of a famous essay on the nature of evolution (‘Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian
Paradigm’ by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin), attentive to the intellectual and conceptual effects of kinds of rhetoric in the writing of science.
Sweeting, Adam, and Thomas C. Crochunis, ‘Performing the Wild: Rethinking Wilderness and Theater Space’, in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 325–40. On some surprising connections between the conventions of theatrical realism (e.g. the pretence that spectators are absent)
and space-based notion of wilderness.
4 Language beyond the human?
Berghaller, Hannes, ‘“Trees are what everyone needs”: The Lorax, Anthropocentrism, and the Problem of Mimesis’, in Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer (eds.), Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 155–75. Another critique of Buell's ‘realism’.
Berry, Wendell, Standing by Words: Essays (Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 1983). Relates the disastrous environmental illiteracy of modern societies to a ‘disintegration of language’.
Kenneally, Christine, The First Word: The Search for the Origin of Language (London: Viking, 2007).
Morton, Timothy, chapter on ‘ecomimesis’ in Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 29–79. Attacks some ecocriticism for merely indulging rather than critically examining the produced effect of some nature writing
that language may convey the natural world directly, without mediation.
Nielsen, Dorothy M., ‘
Prosopopoeia and the Ethics of Ecological Advocacy in the Poetry of Denise Levertov and Gary Snyder’,
Contemporary Literature 34 (
1993):
691–713. On poetic techniques that aim to transgress given distinctions between human and non-human (for instance, is Levertov's
calling trees ‘awake’ a literal or figurative expression?).
5 The inherent violence of western thought?
Clark, Timothy, Martin Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2001). An introduction focussed on Heidegger and the literary.
De Bruyn, Ben, ‘The Gathering of Form: Forests, Gardens and Legacies in Robert Pogue Harrison’, in Timothy Clark (ed.), Deconstruction, Environmentalism and Climate Change, special issue of Oxford Literary Review 32.1 (2010), 19–36. An introductory overview of Harrison’s work.
Foltz, Bruce V., Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995).
Harrison, Robert Pogue, The Dominion of the Dead (University of Chicago Press, 2003). On the place and power of the dead in human cultures.
Robert Pogue Harrrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Zimmerman, Michael, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
Robert Pogue Harrrison. ‘Rethinking the Heidegger – Deep Ecology Relationship’, Environmental Ethics 15.3 (autumn 1993): 195–224.
6 Post-humanism and the ‘end of nature’?
Badmington, Neil (ed.), Posthhumanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000).
Bartlett, Laura, and Thomas B. Byers, ‘Back to the Future: The Humanist “Matrix”’, Cultural Critique 53 (winter 2003): 28–46. A reading from a post-humanist stance of the film The Matrix (dirs. Andy and Larry Wachowski).
Dougherty, Stephen, ‘Culture in the Disk Drive: Computation, Mimetics, and the Rise of Posthumanism’, Diacritics 31.4 (winter 2001): 85–102.
Palmer, Louis H., III, ‘Articulating the Cyborg: An Impure Model of Environmental Revolution’, in Steven Rosendale (ed.), The Greening of Literary Scholarship (University of Iowa Press, 2002), 165–77.
Strickler, Breyan, ‘The Pathologization of Environmental Discourse: Melding Disability Studies and Ecocriticism in Urban Grunge Novels’, ISLE 15.1 (winter 2008): 111–34.
Westling, Louise, ‘Literature, the Environment, and the Question of the Posthuman’, in Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer (eds.), Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 25–48.
The boundaries of the political
The political and ethical remain the dominant categories in which the environmental crisis is debated, so books, articles
and websites are numerous. Particularly useful may be the following.
Dobson, Andrew, Green Political Thought, 4th edn (London: Routledge, 2007).
Dryzek, John S., and David Schlosberg (eds.), Debating the Earth: The Environmental Politics Reader, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 2005).
Elliott, Lorraine, Global Politics of the Environment, 2nd edn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Linkola, Pentti, Can Life Prevail?: A Radical Approach to the Environmental Crisis, trans. Eeuto Rautio (London: Integral Tradition Publishing, 2009). The work of this ‘deepest’ of deep ecologists is not exactly ‘recommended’ but highlighted for a provocative extremism useful for forcing readers to
clarify their own position: ‘Never before in history have the distinguishing values of a culture been things as concretely
destructive for life and the quality of life as democracy, individual freedom and human rights – not to mention money’ (154).
See also the entries for Ulrich Beck as further reading for Chapter 8 below.
7 Thinking like a mountain?
Fromm, Harold, ‘Aldo Leopold: Aesthetic “Anthropocentrist”’, in Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic (eds.), The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism 1993–2003 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 3–9. An attack on Leopold's arguably dated notions of the ecological as still inherently aesthetic and anthropocentric.
Moore, Kathleen Dean, and Lisa H. Sideris (eds.), Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008).
Ryden, Kent C., ‘“How could a weed be a book?”: Books, Ethics, Power, and a Sand County Almanac’, ISLE 15.1 (winter 2008): 1–10. On the trope of ‘reading’ nature in Leopold and the development of a non-human-centred ecological literacy.
8 Environmental justice and the move ‘beyond nature writing’
Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992).
Beck, Ulrich, World Risk Society (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1998).
These books outline Beck's theses on ‘risk society’: that modern societies are characterised by manufactured risks – pollution,
climate change, new illnesses – that undermine their own proclaimed bases in reason and equity. See Ursula K.
Heise's chapter, ‘Narrative in the World Risk Society’, in her
Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (Oxford
University Press, 2008), 119–59.
Bennett, Michael, and David W. Teague (eds.), The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999).
Dwyer, June, ‘Ethnic Home Improvement: Gentrifying the Ghetto, Spicing up the Suburbs’, ISLE 14.2 (summer 2007): 165–82.
Grewe-Volpp, Christa, ‘Nature “out there” and as “a social player”: Some Basic Consequences for a Literary Critical Analysis’, in Catrin Gersdorf
and Sylvia Mayer (eds.),
Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (
Amsterdam:
Rodopi,
2006),
71–86. Relates to the tension between objectivist/realist and
constructivist approaches to the natural world. Argues for ways of conceptualising it both as an material entity and as an
agent in human culture in its own right. See ‘The antinomy of environmental criticism’ at the end of
Chapter 8.
Harvey, David, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1996). On social and environmental justice.
Outka, Paul, Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Palgrave, 2008).
Yamashiro, Shin, ‘An Introduction to “Environmental Justice” in North American Ecocriticism: Its Origin and Practice’, in Nirmal Selvamony et al. (eds.), Essays in Ecocriticism (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2007), 40–56.
‘Social ecology’
Foster, John Bellamy, Ecology Against Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002).
John Bellamy Foster, Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). Refutes the common view that Marx ignored ecological issues.
Light, A. (ed.), Social Ecology after Bookchin (New York: Guildford Press, 1998).
Zimmerman, Michael, Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Assesses debates between ‘deep ecology’, ‘social ecology’ and ecofeminism.
9 Two readings: European ecojustice
Goodbody, Axel (ed.), The Culture of German Environmentalism: Anxieties, Visions, Realities (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2002).
Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (1973; London: Hogarth, 1993).
Collections of ecocritical essays with a particularly European focus are:
Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer (eds.), Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006).
Catrin Gersdorf and Syvia Mayer (eds.), Natur-Kultur-Text: Beiträge zu Ökologie und Literaturwissenschaft (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2005).
See also Richard Kerridge (ed.), Crowded Space, forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press, on ecocriticism in the UK.
10 Liberalism and green moralism
Hinchman, Lewis P., and Sandra K. Hinchman, ‘Should Environmentalists Reject the Enlightenment?’, Review of Politics 63 (2001): 663–92.
Roszak, Theodore, Mary E. Gomes and Allen D. Kanner (eds.), Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1995). Essays on the controversial relation of individual psychic health to the health of the planet (listed here because this
issue involves notions of selfhood at odds with the individualistic norms of autonomy/independence central to the dominant liberal tradition in politics).
Thiele, Leslie Paul, ‘Nature and Freedom: A Heideggerian Critique of Biocentric and Sociocentric Environmentalism’, Environmental Ethics 17 (1995): 171–90.
Wissenburg, Marcel,
Green Liberalism: The Free and the Green Society (
University College London Press,
1998). An attempt to reconcile liberalism and environmental politics. For a critique, see Robyn Eckersley,
The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004),
Chapter 4.
11 Ecofeminism
Alaimo, Stacy, ‘Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for an Environmental Feminism’, Feminist Studies 20 (1994): 133–54. On the debate between Donna Haraway's post-humanist ‘cyborg’ manifesto and some ecofeminist arguments.
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, ‘Queering Ecocultural Studies’, Cultural Studies 22 (2008): 455–76.
Sandilands, Catriona, ‘Desiring Nature: Queering Ethics: Adventures in Erotogenic Environments’, Environmental Ethics 23 (2001): 169–88.
Warren, Karren J. (ed.), Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). A useful critical anthology.
12 ‘Post-colonial’ ecojustice
Chavkin, Allan, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony: A Casebook (Oxford University Press, 2002).
‘Green Postcolonialism’, special issue of Interventions 9.1 (2007), ed. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin.
Guha, Ramachandra, ‘Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Protection: A Third World Critique’, Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71–83.
Kamada, Roy Osamu, ‘Postcolonial Romanticisms: Derek Walcott and the Melancholic Narrative of Landscape’, in J. Scott Bryson (ed.), Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002), 207–20.
Nixon, Rob, ‘Environmentalism and Postcolonialism’, in Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton and Jed Esty (eds.), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 233–51.
Ombaka, Christine, ‘War and Environment in African Literature’, in Patrick Murphy (ed.), Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), 327–36.
Overpopulation
Bandarage, Asoka, Women, Population, and Global Crisis: A Political–Economic Analysis (London: Zed Books, 1997). A synthesis of Third World, feminist, socialist and ecological thinking and solutions, criticising the assumption that
overpopulation is one of the root causes of global crisis.
Meadows, D., J. Randers and W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (London: Earthscan, 2005).
For changing literary representations of overpopulation, see Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (Oxford University Press, 2008); also Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (New York: Routledge, 2004), 143–50.
13 Questions of scale: the local, the national and the global
Ball, Eric L., ‘The Place Within: Scott Russell Sanders on Literature and Art of Place’, ISLE 15.2 (summer 2008): 137–55.
Murphy, Patrick D., ‘Grounding Anotherness and Answerability through Allonational Ecoliterature Formations’, in Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer
(eds.), Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 417–34. An application of thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin to environmental politics, the state and the ethical claims of non-human others.
Smith, Mick, ‘Against the Enclosure of the Ethical Commons: Radical Environmentalism as an “Ethics of Place”’, Environmental Ethics 18 (1997): 339–53.
Talent, David, ‘The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History’, Journal of American History 86 (1999): 965–75.
Science and the struggle for intellectual authority
14 Science and the crisis of authority
Demeritt, David, ‘The Construction of Global Warming and the Politics of Science’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91 (2001): 307–37.
Oates, Matthew, ‘The Dying of the Light: Values in Nature and the Environment’, British Wildlife 18.2 (December 2006): 88–95. Argues how the would-be scientific terminology of nature conservation obscures what are actually decisions about ethical
and political values.
Walls, Laura Dassow, ‘Seeking Common Ground: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities’, in Annie Merril Ingram et al. (eds.), Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 199–208.
Woods, Gioia, ‘Sci-Animism: American Poetry and Science’, ISLE 15.2 (summer 2008): 199–210.
15 Science studies
Asdal, Kristin, ‘The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-Constructivist Challenge to Environmental History’, History and Theory 42.4 (December 2003): 60–74. Good critical introduction to Haraway and Latour in relation to ecological thinking (focussed on issues of gender in
particular).
Gifford, Terry, ‘The Social Construction of Nature’, ISLE 13.2 (1996): 27–35.
Grafen, Alan, and Mark Ridley (eds.), Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think (Oxford University Press, 2007).
Guillory, John, ‘The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism’, Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 470–508. Overview of a notorious controversy in the mid 1990s about the nature and status of ‘science studies’.
Latour, Bruno,Remodelling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2007). Perhaps Latour's most accessible book.
Latour Bruno, ‘The Impact of Science Studies on Political Philosophy’, Science, Technology, and Human Values 16.1 (winter 1991): 3–19.
Rose, Dan, ‘The Repatriation of Anthropology’ [on Latour's We Have Never Been Modern, 1993], American Literary History 8.1 (spring 1996): 170–83.
16 Evolutionary theories of literature
Cohen, Michael P., ‘Reading after Darwin: A Prospectus’, in Annie Merril Ingram et al. (eds.), Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 221–33.
Seamon, Roger, review of Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2005): 298–300.
17 Interdisciplinarity and science: two essays on human evolution
Moeran, Joe, Interdisciplinarity (New Critical Idiom), 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2010).
Further material on/in ‘narrative scholarship’:
Adelson, Glenn, and John Elder, ‘Robert Frost's Ecosystem of Meanings in “Spring Pools”’, ISLE 13.2 (2006): 1–17.
Roorda, Randall, ‘Antinomies of Participation in Literacy and Wilderness’, ISLE 14.2 (summer 2007): 71–87.
The animal mirror
Institute for Critical Animal Studies,
www.criticalanimalstudies.org/ ‘The aim of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) is to provide a space for the development of a “critical” approach
to animal studies, one which perceives that relations between human and nonhuman animals are now at a point of crisis which
implicates the planet as a whole.’
18 Ethics and the non-human animal
Danta, Chris, and Dimitris Vardoulakis (eds.), ‘The Political Animal’, special issue of SubStance 37.3 (2008).
Derrida, Jacques, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham, 2008). A sustained deconstruction of the intellectual underpinnings of speciesism.
Haraway, Donna, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness, 2nd edn (Chicago University Press, 2003). Focussed on the human–dog relationship, Haraway studies how the two species co-evolved with each other as workers/helpers,
companions/friends or threats and enemies. See also her When Species Meet (Posthumanities) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Raglon, Rebecca, and Marian Scholtmeijer, ‘“Animals are not believers in ecology”: Mapping Critical Differences between Environmental and Animal Advocacy Literatures’, ISLE 14.2 (summer 2007): 121–40.
Ryder, Richard D., Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes Towards Speciesism, 2nd edn (London: Berg, 2000).
The Animal Series (general editor Jonathan Burt) of Reaktion Books offers numerous short monographs, often written by literary
critics, on groups of animals that have been prominent in human culture (e.g. Crow, Eel, Cockroach, Bee, Hare, etc.). These are more texts of cultural history than of natural history.
19 ‘Anthropomorphism’
Crist, Eileen, Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).
Haraway, Donna, ‘Otherworldly Conversations: Terran Topics, Local Terms’, in The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 125–50. On the ‘animal–industrial’ complex, modes of discourse about animals and animal subjectivity (‘What is inter-subjectivity
between radically different kinds of subjects?’ [143]).
McMurry, Andrew, ‘“In their own language”: Sarah Orne Jewett and the Question of Nonhuman Speaking Subjects’, ISLE 6.1 (1999): 51–63.
Rees, Amanda, ‘Anthropomorphism, Anthropocentrism, and Anecdote: Primatologists on Primatologists’, Science, Technology, and Human Values 26 (2001): 227–47. On the peculiar difficulties posed in the study of creatures similar to ourselves.