Table of Contents

Introduction, Eduardo Valls Oyarzun



Part I

Towards a New Ecocritical Ethics: Cultural Perspectives



Chapter 1. Bringing Culture Back to Nature: A Biosemiotic Reading of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Anastasia Cardone

Chapter 2. “Have You Seen the Snow Leopard?”: Animal Commodity Resistance in Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leo, Frank Izaguirre

Chapter 3. “With One Arm I Supported Her: The Other Arm Was the Executioner’s”: An Ecofeminist Reading of Anna Kavan’s Ice, Laura de la Parra

Chapter 4. “We Were Neither What We Had Been Nor What We Would Become”: Frankensteinian Science and Liminal States in Jeff VanderMeer’sAnnihilation, Jessica Roberts

Chapter 5. Santiago Rusiñol’s Abandoned Gardens: Between the Poetics of Ruin and the Defense of a Lost Identity, Laura Sanz García



Part II

Empowering Nature: Transcending Anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene



Chapter 6. Welcoming Cosmos: A Comparative Study of Narrative, Nature and Cosmopolitanism in The Wall and Pond, Hande Gurses

Chapter 7. A Few Sockeyes and Dying Embers in What Is Left of the Forest: Settler Culture and Changing Views of Nature in Gail Anderson Dargatz’s Latest Novels, Pedro Miguel Carmona

Chapter 8. The Last Epigram: Christian Bök’sXenotext, Ryan Winet

Chapter 9. A Poetic Correspondence on Ecology and the Green World: Allan Cooper and Harry Thurston’sThe Deer Yard, Leonor Martínez

Chapter 10. Wonders and Threats of Symbiotic Relationships in the Anthropocene: Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern ReachTrilogy, Patrycja Austin



Part III

The Age of Dystopia: Nature against Culture in Contemporary Literature and Film



Chapter 11. Demonizing Nature: Ecocriticism and Popular Fantasy, Peter Melville

Chapter 12. Accepting the X: Uncanny Encounters with Nature and the Wilderness in Jeff Vandermeer’sThe Southern Reach Trilogy, Carmen Méndez

Chapter 13. Ecocritical Archaeologies of Global Ecocide in 21st–Century Post–Apocalyptic Films, Mónica Martí

Chapter 14. Biohazard, Eco–terror and the Rise of Post–Human Dystopia: Re (b) ordering Space to Promote Environmental Ethics in ZalBatmanglij’sThe East and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Paula Barba Guerrero

Chapter 15. Another Inconvenient Truth: Hollywood, the Myth of GreenCapitalism, Víctor Junco

Chapter 16. De–Evolution, Dystopia and Apocalypse in American Postmodern Speculative Fiction, Javier Martín Párraga

Index

About the Editors

About the Contributors

About the Author

Eduardo Valls Oyarzun lectures at the Department of English and American Literature, Complutense University of Madrid.



Rebeca Gualberto Valverde works as assistant professor at the Complutense University of Madrid.



Noelia Malla García works as an assistant professor of English at the Department of English Philology at the University of Extremadura.



María Colom Jiménez works as an assistant professor at Complutense University of Madrid.



Before becoming a language teacher, Rebeca Cordero Sánchez worked as a research assistant in the English Department at the Complutense University of Madrid.

Reviews

Avenging Nature comprises an exceptionally insightful collection of top-quality analyses of the portrayal of "insubordinate nature" in a carefully selected corpus of literature, art, and film from Europe and North America. Working from multiple theoretical focuses, contributors to this important volume reassess how cultural producers articulate nature's "striking back" and vengeance against longstanding anthropocentrism. This book is a major international contribution to ecocritical scholarship. --Shelley Godsland, University of Amsterdam

Nature is certainly avenged through this book, Avenging Nature. The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature bears witness to the wealth of creative global responses to an endangered nature in the Anthropocene. Its chapters distill the ecological wisdom of literature, art, and cinema from the early twentieth-century production of Spanish symbolist poet and painter Santiago Rusi�ol to the groundbreaking genetic writing of Christian B�k in The Xenotext. It highlights the disturbing message of dystopian narratives such as Jeff Vandermeer's The Southern Reach Trilogy or Zal Batmanglij's The East while reflecting anew on some classics of nature writing such as Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. This book deserves the attention of those seeking to understand how ecocritical thinking applied to manifold artistic expressions serves to unearth the voice of nature to make it heard loud and clear.--Diana Villanueva Romero, Universidad de Extremadura

This topical and timely exploration of the fraught relationship between humanity and nature along three major axes--ecocritical ethics, empowering nature and dystopias--comprises sixteen finely honed contributions by an international array of scholars. Focusing predominantly on contemporary Anglophone literature, the individually-authored chapters analyse how cultural texts have engaged in various yet interrelated ways with the aforementioned relationship through approaches that scholars and students hitherto unfamiliar with the topic or with its literary and cultural inscriptions will find compelling.--Glyn Hambrook, University of Wolverhampton