PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Greta Gaard is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls, US. Simon C. Estok is Professor of English at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea. Serpil Oppermann is Professor of English at Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey.
International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism, the most recent publication in Routledge's Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature series, offers a much needed reassessment of the crucial contributions of feminist scholarship to the origins of ecocriticism, while at the same time expanding feminist ecocriticism in new and exciting directions. This volume brings together fifteen essays bridging various disciplines, including ecofeminism, postcolonial ecocriticism, animal studies, queer theory, gender studies, and cross-cultural and international ecocriticism. --Sara Gabler Thomas, University of Mississippi, Journal of Ecocriticism Gaard, Estok, and Oppermann bring together vibrant essays that range, for example, from an explosion of dioxins in Seveso, Italy, that touches off strong political and ideological polemics over women and their bodies, to discussions in Australia of how to bring postcolonial, ecological, and feminist understandings together to build a grounded ethics and aesthetics of decolonization, to a group of dog mothers in Taiwan that defiantly cares for stray animals as a way to resist a massively industrialized economy built on trenchant, institutionalized, and unspoken androcentrism. As a whole, the book powerfully illustrates why feminist views, methods, and interpretations, examined from specifically international contexts, must become more central to the field of ecocriticism. --Joni Adamson, Professor, English and Environmental Humanities, School of Letters and Sciences and Senior Sustainability Scholar, Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University, US I have always felt that there is something intrinsically feminist about the practice of ecocriticism, going all the way back to early ecocritical concerns with wild places and marginalized literary genres. One of the central ecocritical urges is the impulse, a la feminism, to critique normativities, to question mainstream or dominant ways of viewing the world, particularly those which are unjust and unsustainable. This new volume offers a rich variety of approaches to this vital project, reinforcing our understanding of feminist ecocriticism (take note of this important term) as a major dimension of ecocritical thought throughout the world. --Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, US, Editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment Each chapter raises enough issues, ideas, and inspiration for a whole series of further books at the cutting edge of a reinvigorated ecofeminist practice. These authors are driven by a rigorous sense of where feminist ecocriticism has come from, and why it needs to explore the richly diverse and materially alive ethical dramas of gendered ontologies. --Terry Gifford, Visiting Professor at Bath Spa University, Profesor Honorifico at Universidad de Alicante and co-editor of Feminismo/s 22 'Ecofeminism' This collection affirms the ongoing importance of feminist perspectives in the environmental humanities. Working both from and against earlier traditions of ecofeminism, contributors to this volume explore issues of gender, sex, natalism, apocalypticism, embodiment, violence, justice, race, species, and colonialism as key analytic concerns for feminist ecocriticism. The collection thus develops a new understanding of ecofeminism, one that is much more attentive to power, intersectionality and diversity than earlier works in the field. --Catriona Sandilands, Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, and coeditor of Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010).
