The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place

Bioregionalism is an innovative way of thinking about place and planet from an ecological perspective. Although bioregional ideas occur regularly in ecocritical writing, until now no systematic effort has been made to outline the principles of bioregional literary criticism and to use it as a way to read, write, understand, and teach literature.

The twenty-four original essays here are written by an outstanding selection of international scholars. The range of bioregions covered is global and includes such diverse places as British Columbia’s Meldrum Creek and Italy’s Po River Valley, the Arctic and the Outback. There are even forays into cyberspace and outer space. In their comprehensive introduction, the editors map the terrain of the bioregional movement, including its history and potential to inspire and invigorate place-based and environmental literary criticism.

Responding to bioregional tenets, this volume is divided into four sections. The essays in the “Reinhabiting” section narrate experiments in living-in-place and restoring damaged environments. The “Rereading” essays practice bioregional literary criticism, both by examining texts with strong ties to bioregional paradigms and by opening other, less-obvious texts to bioregional analysis. In “Reimagining,” the essays push bioregionalism to evolve—by expanding its corpus of texts, coupling its perspectives with other approaches, or challenging its core constructs. Essays in the “Renewal” section address bioregional pedagogy, beginning with local habitat studies and concluding with musings about the Internet.

In response to the environmental crisis, we must reimagine our relationship to the places we inhabit. This volume shows how literature and literary studies are fundamental tools to such a reimagining.

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The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place

Bioregionalism is an innovative way of thinking about place and planet from an ecological perspective. Although bioregional ideas occur regularly in ecocritical writing, until now no systematic effort has been made to outline the principles of bioregional literary criticism and to use it as a way to read, write, understand, and teach literature.

The twenty-four original essays here are written by an outstanding selection of international scholars. The range of bioregions covered is global and includes such diverse places as British Columbia’s Meldrum Creek and Italy’s Po River Valley, the Arctic and the Outback. There are even forays into cyberspace and outer space. In their comprehensive introduction, the editors map the terrain of the bioregional movement, including its history and potential to inspire and invigorate place-based and environmental literary criticism.

Responding to bioregional tenets, this volume is divided into four sections. The essays in the “Reinhabiting” section narrate experiments in living-in-place and restoring damaged environments. The “Rereading” essays practice bioregional literary criticism, both by examining texts with strong ties to bioregional paradigms and by opening other, less-obvious texts to bioregional analysis. In “Reimagining,” the essays push bioregionalism to evolve—by expanding its corpus of texts, coupling its perspectives with other approaches, or challenging its core constructs. Essays in the “Renewal” section address bioregional pedagogy, beginning with local habitat studies and concluding with musings about the Internet.

In response to the environmental crisis, we must reimagine our relationship to the places we inhabit. This volume shows how literature and literary studies are fundamental tools to such a reimagining.

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Overview

Bioregionalism is an innovative way of thinking about place and planet from an ecological perspective. Although bioregional ideas occur regularly in ecocritical writing, until now no systematic effort has been made to outline the principles of bioregional literary criticism and to use it as a way to read, write, understand, and teach literature.

The twenty-four original essays here are written by an outstanding selection of international scholars. The range of bioregions covered is global and includes such diverse places as British Columbia’s Meldrum Creek and Italy’s Po River Valley, the Arctic and the Outback. There are even forays into cyberspace and outer space. In their comprehensive introduction, the editors map the terrain of the bioregional movement, including its history and potential to inspire and invigorate place-based and environmental literary criticism.

Responding to bioregional tenets, this volume is divided into four sections. The essays in the “Reinhabiting” section narrate experiments in living-in-place and restoring damaged environments. The “Rereading” essays practice bioregional literary criticism, both by examining texts with strong ties to bioregional paradigms and by opening other, less-obvious texts to bioregional analysis. In “Reimagining,” the essays push bioregionalism to evolve—by expanding its corpus of texts, coupling its perspectives with other approaches, or challenging its core constructs. Essays in the “Renewal” section address bioregional pedagogy, beginning with local habitat studies and concluding with musings about the Internet.

In response to the environmental crisis, we must reimagine our relationship to the places we inhabit. This volume shows how literature and literary studies are fundamental tools to such a reimagining.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780820343679
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Publication date: 03/01/2012
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 440
File size: 8 MB

About the Author

CHERYLL GLOTFELTY is a professor of literature and the environment at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the editor of Literary Nevada: Writings from the Silver State and a coeditor of The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place. She is a founding officer of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment.
JOHN LANE is professor emeritus of environmental studies at Wofford College. A 2014 inductee into the South Carolina Academy of Authors, his books include Circling Home, My Paddle to the Sea, and Coyote Settles the South (all Georgia). He is also coeditor of The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South (also Georgia), and he has published numerous volumes of poetry, essays, and novels. Coming into Animal Presence is his most recent work. He lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments

Introduction
Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster

I. Reinhabiting
Big Picture, Local Place: A Conversation with David Robertson and Robert L. Thayer Jr.
Cheryll Glotfelty

Still under the Influence: The Bioregional Origins of the Hub City Writers Project
John Lane

Representing Chicago Wilderness
Rinda West

"To Become Beavers of Sorts": Eric Collier's Memoir of Creative Ecology at Meldrum Creek
Norah Bowman-Broz

The Poetics of Water: Currents of Reclamation in the Columbia River Basin
Chad Wriglesworth

Restoring the Imagination of Place: Narrative Reinhabitation and the Po Valley
Serenella Iovino

"This Is What Matters": Reinhabitory Discourse and the "Poetics of Responsibility" in the Work of Janisse Ray
Bart Welling

II. Rereading
Mapping Placelore: Tim Robinson's Ambulation and Articulation of Connemara as Bioregion
Christine Cusick

The Challenge of Writing Bioregionally: Performing the Bow River in Jon Whyte's Minisniwapta: Voices of the River
Harry Vandervlist

Figures of Life: Beverley Farmer's The Seal Woman as an Australian Bioregional Novel
Ruth Blair

Melancholy Botany: Charlotte Smith's Bioregional Poetic Imaginary
Heather Kerr

The Nature of Region: Russell Banks, New England, and New York
Kent C. Ryden

Critical Utopianism and Bioregional Ecocriticism
David Landis Barnhill

Critical Bioregionalist Method in Dune: A Position Paper
Daniel Gustav Anderson

III. Reimagining
"Los campos extraños de esta ciudad"/"The strange fields of this city": Urban Bioregionalist Identity and Environmental Justice in Lorna Dee Cervantes's "Freeway 280"
Jill Gatlin

Bioregionalism, Postcolonial Literatures, and Ben Okri's The Famished Road
Erin James

Seasons and Nomads: Reflections on Bioregionalism in Australia
Libby Robin

Reading Climate Change and Work in the Circumpolar North
Pavel Cenkl

Douglas Livingstone's Poetry and the (Im)possibility of the Bioregion
Dan Wylie

"Fully motile and AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS": Thinking the Feral into Bioregionalism
Anne Milne

IV. Renewal
Out of the Field Guide: Teaching Habitat Studies
Laurie Ricou

Switching on Light Bulbs and Blowing Up Mountains: Ecoliteracy and Energy Consumption in General Education English Courses
Wes Berry

Teaching Bioregional Perception—at a Distance
Laird Christensen

Where You at 20.0
Kathryn Miles and Mitchell Thomashow

A Bioregional Booklist
Kyle Bladow

Contributors
Index

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