Material Ecocriticism offers new ways to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, mind and matter, without falling into well-worn paths of thinking. Bringing ecocriticism closer to the material turn, the contributions to this landmark volume focus on material forces and substances, the agency of things, processes, narratives and stories, and making meaning out of the world. This broad-ranging reflection on contemporary human experience and expression provokes new understandings of the planet to which we are intimately connected.
The contributions to this collection are consistently well-written, balancing technical language, poetic vividness, and accessibility. Of interest to literary scholars and readers throughout the environmental humanities and theoretical sciences.
Foreword: Storied Matter
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Introduction: Stories Come to Matter
Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann
Part I. Material Ecocriticism: Theories and Relations
1. From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism: Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency Serpil Oppermann
2. On the Limits of Agency: Notes on the Material Turn from a Systems-Theoretical Perspective
Hannes Bergthaller
3. Creative Matter and Creative Mind: Cultural Ecology and Literary Creativity
Hubert Zapf
4. Natural Play, Natural Metaphor and Natural Stories: Biosemiotic Realism
Wendy Wheeler
5. The Ecology of Color: Goethes Materialist Optics and Ecological Posthumanism Heather Sullivan
Part II. Narratives of Matter
6. Bodies of Naples: Stories, Matter, and the Landscapes of Porosity
Serenella Iovino
7. When It Rains
Lowell Duckert
8. Painful Material Realities, Avoidance, Ecophobia
Simon C. Estok
9. Semiotization of Matter: A Hybrid Zone between Biosemiotics and Material Ecocriticism
Timo Maran
Part III. Politics of Matter
10. Pro/Polis: Three Forays into the Political Lives of Bees
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