An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature: From Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie

by R. Marzec

Overview

This book argues that humanity's relationship to the land has undergone a fundamental and calamitous change. Marzec reveals how the historical phenomenon known as the 'enclosure movement' has effected not only the ecosystems and the geopolitics of the Twenty-First century, but on how we relate to the earth and conceive of ourselves as human.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349537068
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	06/08/2007
Edition description:	1st ed. 2007
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

ROBERT MARZEC is Associate Professor of English Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Global Studies, and Contemporary Criticism at the State University of New York at Fredonia, USA.

Table of Contents

Enclosures, Colonization, and the Robinson Crusoe Syndrome: Notes Toward an Ontology of Land The Territorialization of Land Problematizing Enclosure in the Eighteenth-Century Inhabiting Land in the Age of Empire: Twentieth-Century Literature

Editorial Reviews

"Marzec convincingly demonstrates that the impact of this history of the enclosure movement on British (and Western) humanity's ontological comportment toward the land and its understanding of inhabitancy was epochal in significance. This book should be considered in the top five most important studies on postcolonialism after Edward Said's Orientalism." - William V. Spanos, Binghamton University

"Theoretically sophisticated and historically sensitive, Marzec's study offers a rich geneological analysis of the postcolonial novel, and accounts for the ways in which this genre works across the asymmetries of the colonizer-colonized divide. A welcome addition to our postcolonial understanding of the ongoing complicity between culture and imperialism." - Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, University of California, Irvine

From the Publisher