Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation

by Serenella Iovino

Overview

Winner of the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies 2016
Winner of the American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize 2016

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

Written by one of Europe's leading critics, Ecocriticism and Italy reads the diverse landscapes of Italy in the cultural imagination. From death in Venice as a literary trope and petrochemical curse, through the volcanoes of Naples to wine, food and environmental violence in Piedmont, Serenella Iovino explores Italy as a text where ecology and imagination meet. Examining cases where justice, society and politics interlace with stories of land and life, pollution and redemption, the book argues that literature, art and criticism are able to transform the unexpressed voices of these suffering worlds into stories of resistance and practices of liberation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472571670
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	01/28/2016
Series:	Environmental Cultures
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Serenella Iovino is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Turin, Italy. She is a past president of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment (EASLCE) and her previous books include Ecologia Letteraria (2006) and, as co-editor, Material Ecocriticism (2014).
Serenella Iovino is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Turin, Italy. She is a past president of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment (EASLCE) and her previous books include Ecologia Letteraria (2006) and, as co-editor, Material Ecocriticism (2014).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I. Bodies of Naples: A Journey in the Landscapes of Porosity

II. Cognitive Justice and the Truth of Biology: Death (and Life) in Venice

III. Three Earthquakes: Wounds, Signs, and Resisting Arts in Belice, Irpinia, and L'Aquila.

IV. Slow: Piedmont's Stories of Landscapes, Resistance, and Liberation.

Works Cited

Index

Editorial Reviews

Ecocriticism and Italy is a major work of environmental justice studies. In urging us "to heed the tacit voices of the world, +? Serenella Iovino testifies to the conjoined social, ecological and geological forces that contour the landscapes of crisis, suffering, resistance and unsteady hope. Her book is in the deepest sense material-alive to the complex power of "storied matter+? to shape and animate the tectonic powers that are both political and more-than-human.
Rob Nixon, author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Thomas A. and Currie C. Barron Family Professor in Humanities and the Environment, Princeton University, USA

Seamlessly interweaving philosophical reflection, political critique, geo-historical narrative, and literary exegesis, Iovino's arresting new book expands the trans-disciplinary repertoire of ecocriticism at the same time that it uncovers the more-than-human (re-)fashioning of exemplary Italian places and their global significance. Poetic, informative and insightful, this is narrative scholarship at its eloquent best, to be savoured like (and preferably with) a glass of the Piedmontese Nebbiolo wine that features in the last chapter. Clear-sighted yet resolutely hopeful, It is also a work to inspire more such practices of resistance and liberation that it at once describes and instantiates.
Kate Rigby, Professor of Environmental Humanities, Monash University, USA. Author of Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (2015).

Serenella Iovino's ambitious study expands both the terms in its title: 'ecocriticism' here includes environmental history and art criticism, while 'Italy' is emblematic of the rest of the world just as it is ecologically inseparable. By turns lyrical, illuminating and justly condemnatory, Ecocriticism and Italy highlights the remarkable insights afforded by new materialist analysis at its finest.
Greg Garrard, Associate Professor of Sustainability, University of British Columbia, Canada

From the Publisher

Ecocriticism and Italy is a very important work in environmental philosophy. The Italian examples analysed by Serenella Iovino bring to the fore crucial topics, such as new materialism and political impersonality, that the contemporary philosophical debate can no longer ignore. Through the pretext of earthquakes and Italian environmental catastrophes, Iovino's book presents theses and theoretical insights that force us to completely rethink the relationship between Homo Sapiens and the environment: it is the outside world as resistance.

Maurizio Ferraris

Serenella Iovino's ambitious study expands both the terms in its title: 'ecocriticism' here includes environmental history and art criticism, while 'Italy' is emblematic of the rest of the world just as it is ecologically inseparable. By turns lyrical, illuminating and justly condemnatory, Ecocriticism and Italy highlights the remarkable insights afforded by new materialist analysis at its finest.

Greg Garrard

Serenella Iovino has given us a marvelous book, written with the mastery of a novelist and the knowledge of a top world scholar. Cells and rocks, lyrics and workers, waste and earthquakes are blended into the pages of a book which will change forever your ways of thinking of Italy.

Marco Armiero

Ecocriticism and Italy is a bracing intervention--a beautiful and sometimes surreal work of material ecocriticism. Insisting we inhabit the text of the world, Iovino pens memorable narrative landscapes, marked by earthquakes, toxins, wars, and entangled violence, but also by art, eco-gastronomy, and other geographies of resistance. Iovino's Italy is a place of bioconvergence where the temporalities of industrial carcinogens meet the temporalities of carefully crafted wine. With its brilliant argument that "the impersonal is political," this riveting study will be invaluable for new materialism, environmental justice, environmentalism, and contemporary theories of the inhuman.

Stacy Alaimo

Seamlessly interweaving philosophical reflection, political critique, geo-historical narrative, and literary exegesis, Iovino's arresting new book expands the trans-disciplinary repertoire of ecocriticism at the same time that it uncovers the more-than-human (re-)fashioning of exemplary Italian places and their global significance. Poetic, informative and insightful, this is narrative scholarship at its eloquent best, to be savoured like (and preferably with) a glass of the Piedmontese Nebbiolo wine that features in the last chapter. Clear-sighted yet resolutely hopeful, It is also a work to inspire more such practices of resistance and liberation that it at once describes and instantiates.

Kate Rigby

Ecocriticism and Italy is a major work of environmental justice studies. In urging us "to heed the tacit voices of the world," Serenella Iovino testifies to the conjoined social, ecological and geological forces that contour the landscapes of crisis, suffering, resistance and unsteady hope. Her book is in the deepest sense material-alive to the complex power of "storied matter" to shape and animate the tectonic powers that are both political and more-than-human.

Rob Nixon