Editorial: On Cuteness, Shock, Romance, and Refuge

From the politics of cuteness and the pluvial conditions of refuge to the ecological potency of shock and Romance, the seven essays gathered in this open edition of Green Letters incorporate a wide spectrum of methodologies and materials that strike new and at times unexpected grounds in ecocritical scholarship. While several essays in this issue build strongly upon established tranches of ecocritical thought in their examination of arboreal landscapes, biosemiotics, and historical relations between poetry and science, other articles ask us to step off the beaten track and to attune to distinctly unconventional and understudied repositories of ecological thought. Alongside the familiar ecological matter of trees, storms and cityscapes, we are invited to contemplate the mute figure of Hello Kitty and to consider the ecocritical potential of the popular Romance imaginaries of Mills & Boon. While these materials might not initially strike us as the usual fodder of environmental thought Green Letters has always been a space that seeks to foster new directions in the field, and in this issue we continue our commitment to support innovative research that shocks us out of disciplinary complacency and destabilises entrenched knowledge hierarchies. Opening this issue, Keith Moser’s article ‘A Biosemiotic Reading of J.M.G. Le Clézio’s Fiction: (Re-) Envisioning the Complexity of Other-Than-Human Semiosis and TransSpecific Communication’ provides a rich reading of the score of nonhuman melodies that mark the Nobel Laureate’s novelistic oeuvre. Where Le Clézio’s work has drawn attention from scholars for its sensuous engagement with the nonhuman world, Moser’s analysis takes us deeper into ‘a world comprised of overlapping semiotic realms’, following the threads of biosemiotic relation as they weave through an expanded web of life. Against dichotomous and hierarchical modes of thought that pit ‘the human semiotic agent against soulless automata’, Moser argues that Le Clézio’s work invites us to tune into the ‘splendor of the semiotic elemental symphony in which we are immersed’. Interrogating Western Humanist traditions that suggest only humans can ‘engage in meaningful semiosis’, Moser’s readings alight upon a dazzling range of ‘active interpreters’, including birds, trees, and bacteria, and draws out their attendant modes of sensorial and chemical communication to contest speciesist perspectives that position the human as the apex communicator. Against readings of nonhuman lives as linguistically impoverished, Moser’s argument invites us to tune into trans-species forms of communication and sense-making, and to consider the role literature plays in connecting us to the sonorous polyphony of the non-human world. The next article takes us from the hierarchies of non-human communication into the politics of cuteness in animal studies. In her piece, ‘Just a Dumb Bunny: The Conventions and Rebellions of the Cutified Feminised Animal’, Isabel Galleymore offers up the iconic anthropomorphic image of Hello Kitty and asks one simple, provocative question: ‘why does hello Kitty lack a mouth?’ Building on the preceding consideration of biosemiotics, GREEN LETTERS: STUDIES IN ECOCRITICISM 2022, VOL. 26, NO. 4, 303–306 https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2022.2229035