Green LettersPub Date : 2022-10-22DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2022.2138966
Teresa Fitzpatrick
{"title":"Haunted Nature: Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman","authors":"Teresa Fitzpatrick","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2022.2138966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2022.2138966","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89648401","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Green LettersPub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2214154
Giulia Pacini
{"title":"Rougier de la Bergerie’s Bucolic Poetry and the Nineteenth-Century French Discourse on Climate and Deforestation","authors":"Giulia Pacini","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2214154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2214154","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay examines the bucolic poetry of the French agronomist Jean-Baptiste Rougier de la Bergerie (1762–1836). It presents his views on the value of scientific poetry; situates his writing within the contemporary French discourse on deforestation and climate instability; and shows how his Églogues bucoliques clamoured for action to protect the nation’s woods and thereby regulate meteorological conditions across the land. In this regard Rougier criticised the ignorance and excessive influence of the French Academies in Paris and granted an important voice to rural experiences and perspectives. He therefore decentred traditional sites of authority and defended the value of a horizontal information network offering more empirical and local forms of knowledge.","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":"51 1","pages":"397 - 411"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73638587","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Green LettersPub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2213700
Isabel Galleymore
{"title":"‘Just a Dumb Bunny’: The Conventions and Rebellions of the Cutified Feminised Animal","authors":"Isabel Galleymore","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2213700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2213700","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Cuteness is primarily associated with a trivial superficiality, so it is perhaps no surprise to find it a relatively ignored aesthetic within environmental thought, which tends to favour seriousness and complexity. The emerging field of cute studies has, however, begun to trouble such associations. This article offers an environmental lens on cute studies by taking, as its case study, the cutified, feminised animal and developing Sianne Ngai’s discourse on the power dynamics inherent to cuteness. Examining vivid examples from Hello Kitty to D. H. Lawrence’s poems, I argue that cuteness objectifies and ‘others’ female and animal identities, often to violent effect. Given the cutified, feminised animal’s supposed passivity, what resistance can be expected? Analysing Aase Berg’s bloodthirsty guinea-pig poems, I argue that horror tropes undertaken in a camp, comedic style serve to expose the violence within cuteness, generating an important opportunity for an environmental reframing of the cute.","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":"30 1","pages":"335 - 350"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74895500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Green LettersPub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2214142
Erin M. Fehskens
{"title":"‘The Rain Coming Down in Drenching curtains’: Reading for the Pluvial in the Climate Change Fiction of Chang-Rae Lee and Jane Rawson","authors":"Erin M. Fehskens","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2214142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2214142","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Theorisations of climate change literature rethink realism, the status of human/nonhuman relations and the agency of the landscape. This paper uses Sarah Nuttall’s concept of the pluvial mode to examine how these theoretical prescriptions function in contemporary novels to create conditions of refuge in spaces that have become largely uninhabitable for the majority of a population through climate change. In Jane Rawson’s A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013) and Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) rainstorms instigate conditions hospitable to refuge and immerse the text in a drawn-out connection between that concept and watery images, beings and spaces. The novels locate refuge in the realm of affect or condition, and in so doing, create a disruptive element of possibility in otherwise apocalyptic narratives in which there seems to be no escape from precarity and uncertainty.","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":"121 1","pages":"351 - 366"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85341517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Green LettersPub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2199017
Keith Moser
{"title":"A Biosemiotic Reading of J.M.G. Le Clézio’s Fiction: (Re-) Envisioning the Complexity of Other-Than-Human Semiosis and Trans-Specific Communication","authors":"Keith Moser","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2199017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2199017","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Delving into biosemiotic and endosemiotic theory, this transdisciplinary analysis of Le Clézio’s fiction illustrates how the Franco-Mauritian author undermines the dichotomous thinking that pits the human semiotic agent against soulless automata whose sounds and gestures are nothing but the insignificant product of an internal machinery. Le Clézio takes aim at much of Western philosophy and traditional linguistic theory, which tend to undermine the importance of other-than-human semiosis entirely, in his call for a re-evaluation of the complexity of the signs that are endlessly being conceived, transmitted and interpreted by and between various species. Similar to the founding father of Biosemiotics Jakob von Uexküll, Le Clézio implores us to reinvigorate our dulled senses in the postmodern world in order to (re-) establish a sensorial connection to the ‘score of nature’, thereby enabling us to catch a glimpse of the billions of other biosemiosic threads in the web of life.","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":"24 1","pages":"323 - 334"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80343452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Green LettersPub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2202190
M. Pérez-Gil
{"title":"Mass Tourism, Ecocriticism, and Mills & Boon Romances (1970s-1980s)","authors":"M. Pérez-Gil","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2202190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2202190","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT At first sight, Mills & Boon romances may seem to bear little or no relation to environmentalism; however, critical comments about the negative impact of sun, sea and sand tourism are not uncommon in the pages of these novels. The tourism boom of the 1960s and 1970s led to increasing concern about its effects on the environment. Using a historical approach, I focus on several romance novels set in southern Europe, the area attracting the highest rate of visitors at that time and visibly suffering the consequences of unbridled construction. Some of the tools of econarratology and cognitive ecocriticism serve to provide further insights into the novels.","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":"13 1","pages":"383 - 396"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88463301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Green LettersPub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2217195
A. Burton
{"title":"‘Tree Mountaineers’: Arboreal Materiality on the Fells in the Lakeland Guides of William Wordsworth and Harriet Martineau","authors":"A. Burton","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2217195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2217195","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This ascending line of enquiry will pay close attention to how, through their nineteenth-century Lakeland writings, William Wordsworth and Harriet Martineau attached meaning to the continued presence and perceived role of trees in the landscapes of the English Lake District. The authors wrote about the region when increased numbers of landowners were planting trees for aesthetic, agricultural, and financial purposes on their land, ranging from the villa garden to the fell-side plantation. In this context, this analysis will consider the authors’ perceptions of historical upland tree cover, their aesthetic evaluation of particular planted and self-seeded spaces, and how individual specimens are sites of natural and cultural convergence shaped by the ‘wildness’ of the fells. Focusing on literary Lakeland trees – as discussed by Wordsworth, Martineau, and their circle – this article illustrates an ecological and arbori-cultural understanding of the environment that shifts, in accordance with elevation, from the valley floor up to the mountain top.","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":"50 1","pages":"412 - 424"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90835818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Green LettersPub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2202193
Catherine Lord
{"title":"The Flowers of Extinction: An Ecocritical Flâneur in London, April 2019 to April 2020","authors":"Catherine Lord","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2202193","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2202193","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT How does one do ‘ecocritical Walter Benjamin’ in the city of London? As a professional flâneur between April 2019 and April 2020, I enlisted the support of Benjamin’s 1940 writings ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ and ‘On the Concept of History’, and four poems from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. These lyrics explore entangled spaces between the human and nonhuman world. Benjamin developed two concepts – ‘shock’ and ‘shock experience’ (Chockerlebnis), the latter through his engagement with Baudelaire’s work. Therefore, ecopoetic analyses of Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondances’, ‘Obsession’ (1857), ‘Le Soleil’ and ‘Le Squelette Laboureur’ (1861) aided my analysis of four London sites: Lewisham’s train tracks, Sky Garden, Oxford Circus, and the Charterhouse Museum. Reading the four sites with the aid of Baudelaire’s lyrics allowed an unearthing and creation of dialectical images as they relate to the climate emergency.","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":"36 1","pages":"367 - 382"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86643434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}