This thesis is written in three segments: a novel excerpt, an introduction to the genre of English- Canadian love stories; and a critical reflection on the creative process. The introduction to the genre is written in the style of a book introduction and is intended for a general audience. My ecocritical examination of love stories in English-Canadian fiction concludes that these stories tend to be banal subplots that are nonetheless deeply engaged with nature. In this thesis, “love” always refers to the intimate love shared between two lovers or would-be lovers, be they married or unmarried, gay or straight, very young or elderly. Western culture often posits marriage as the pinnacle of accomplished intimate love, though the books researched for this project profoundly object to this viewpoint. Furthermore, the tendency toward scant, emotionally-impotent, and distinctly un-sexy depictions of love doesn’t register indifference; it registers disillusionment. I assert that a meaningful, distinct, and supportive correlation exists between love stories and nature-human stories in these texts. Where more nature is present, more love is present and vice versa. Where nature is less visible, love is less visible and vice versa. I use the term “ecology of love” to address these instrinsic links—the in between—between humans and nature. The first section of the thesis explores this phenomenon through the story and characters of an original novel excerpt. The second section discusses the reasons for banality, which involve social ennui and disillusionment, geographic obstacles, moral propriety, and the unique conditions that arise in a nation of immigrants.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 246 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 229-246).

This thesis is written in three segments: a novel excerpt, an introduction to the genre of English- Canadian love stories; and a critical reflection on the creative process. The introduction to the genre is written in the style of a book introduction and is intended for a general audience. My ecocritical examination of love stories in English-Canadian fiction concludes that these stories tend to be banal subplots that are nonetheless deeply engaged with nature. In this thesis, “love” always refers to the intimate love shared between two lovers or would-be lovers, be they married or unmarried, gay or straight, very young or elderly. Western culture often posits marriage as the pinnacle of accomplished intimate love, though the books researched for this project profoundly object to this viewpoint. Furthermore, the tendency toward scant, emotionally-impotent, and distinctly un-sexy depictions of love doesn’t register indifference; it registers disillusionment. I assert that a meaningful, distinct, and supportive correlation exists between love stories and nature-human stories in these texts. Where more nature is present, more love is present and vice versa. Where nature is less visible, love is less visible and vice versa. I use the term “ecology of love” to address these instrinsic links—the in between—between humans and nature. The first section of the thesis explores this phenomenon through the story and characters of an original novel excerpt. The second section discusses the reasons for banality, which involve social ennui and disillusionment, geographic obstacles, moral propriety, and the unique conditions that arise in a nation of immigrants.

This thesis will read James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a text that is fundamentally concerned with ecological issues, demonstrating awareness of the land beyond and outside of Dublin. Joyce frequently depicts the colonization of Ireland as centered on the control of land in the form of agriculture, which he brings into the political foreground of the novel's characters. I will argue further that this novel is critical of the violent nationalist rhetoric and insurrections of early 1900s Ireland, a movement which perpetuated the agricultural control of land. As an effective rebellion to this aporia, which Joseph Valente has termed “the metrocolonial double bind,” I will read the novel’s queer ecology, a non-violent resistance that moves beyond constricting categories of human/animal, urban/rural, and opens up the world for novel ways of living and being.

As a global population, inclusive of humans, fauna, and flora, we are each subject, though disproportionality, to the risks associated with our planet’s changing climate. These changes are largely caused by our unabated expulsion of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. Our globalized world and economic activities have largely engendered the burning of fossil fuels. The 2014 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, which means keeping warming below 2°C, we need to achieve emissions scenarios relative to pre-industrial levels. Without such reductions we can expect substantial species extinction, increased food insecurity, frequent extreme precipitation events, continued warming and acidification of the ocean, global mean sea level rise, and more frequent and longer lasting heatwaves. Responding to this means collective action at a global level. In my thesis I ask how the novel can respond to and help us to cognise these demands, as well as to cognise the scale and complexities of climate change, its philosophical and physical implications, and to attend to the particularities of local place whist remaining global in its scope and vision. I argue that climate change gives rise to a new form of novel. My work is primarily concerned with eco-fiction and how it can raise consciousness about climate change. I consider that the novel, as a counterfactual narrative, can personalise the issue, create stories so that we have ways to speak about it and enchant us towards an ecological imagining. My thesis begins by discussing the existing genre of popular climate change fiction. This mostly consists of clichéd, post-apocalyptic and hero-orientated disaster narratives. These novels are often predictable and limited in how they can engage the reader with climate change. In my second chapter I look at how climate change affects and alters our language. Certain processes belonging to it lead to a loss of words but also to the production of new words. I examine these themes in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Marcel Theroux’s Far North (2009) and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007). My third chapter considers how climate change confounds scales and forms of measurement, as it can be invisible, trans-temporal and trans-spatial. I discuss this in reference to John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984) and Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life (2005). In my fourth chapter, by close reading of Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010) and Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), I suggest how much of our existing climate change discourse has become outworn and fails to prompt critical reflection. In my fifth chapter I argue that particular mitigation strategies and consequences of climate change force us to revise certain epistemologies. I examine how this is represented in Jean Hegland’s Into the Forrest (1995) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012). In each of these chapters I suggest that creative writing and revising the form of the novel can take account of these aspects and bring climate change into the imagination. In my final chapter I discuss how Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005) overcomes some of the obstacles associated with representing climate change in the novel. The Hungry Tide’s form, plot and characters are structured by the unique tidal landscape of the Sundarbans, Bengal. Popular fiction typically provides an egocentric account, concerned with the development and interior world of an individual. Yet, they must move towards a more holistic outlook, as found in Ghosh’s example, which can depict the wider interconnections of the nonhuman world. Though climate change is both global in impact and the response it demands, it is particularity with the local that I consider to be essential to eco-fiction. The complexity, wonder and incalculable interconnections and variety owing to place cannot be evoked without such particularity. Therefore climate fiction must balance itself against the broad demands of a global crisis whilst attending to the special character of place and fabric of the local.

In mid-to-late Victorian fiction, pollution and waste drip, ooze, and seep through the built environment, threatening the boundaries between public and private, rich and poor, healthy and ill. Refuse and dirt held a paradoxical place in nineteenth-century society, as matter that was economically valuable, yet had the capacity to contaminate. My dissertation moves from this tension to ask three questions: What roles did dirt and waste play in critiques of capitalism? How did industrial and organic pollution shape the way that the Victorians imagined the natural world in the latter half of the nineteenth century? And how did changing views of the environment transform what constituted a “natural” social order? The project focuses on four Victorian authors fascinated by pollution and waste – Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, and Richard Jefferies – and contextualizes their work in a broader discourse on waste by such figures as John Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, Henry Mayhew, and Charles Darwin. For the Victorians, questions of nature and pollution were not only environmental or scientific. They also had serious implications for the way that society was structured. I argue that for some nineteenth-century writers, visions of strange, contaminated environments offered novel versions of the “natural” order, which in turn allowed them to depict alternative social orders that emphasized stewardship and care while challenging the logic of industrial capitalism. Scholars of the Victorian period have largely discussed depictions of filth in the context of England’s public health movement of the 1840s, identifying links between the containment of dirt and social boundaries. My dissertation builds on this work by arguing that pollution undermined Victorian efforts to distinguish the natural from the unnatural, enabling writers to portray different “natural” models of social, political, and economic organization. Taken together, the works of Mayhew, Braddon, Dickens, Browning, and Jefferies reflect a strain of Victorian thought that saw dirt and waste as central to the development of a just and compassionate social order. Rather than expressing an unmitigated disgust for contaminated spaces, these writers move beyond the nineteenth-century desire for the containment of filth to inscribe otherwise monstrous spaces with possibility.

This thesis is written in three segments: a novel excerpt, an introduction to the genre of English- Canadian love stories; and a critical reflection on the creative process. The introduction to the genre is written in the style of a book introduction and is intended for a general audience. My ecocritical examination of love stories in English-Canadian fiction concludes that these stories tend to be banal subplots that are nonetheless deeply engaged with nature. In this thesis, “love” always refers to the intimate love shared between two lovers or would-be lovers, be they married or unmarried, gay or straight, very young or elderly. Western culture often posits marriage as the pinnacle of accomplished intimate love, though the books researched for this project profoundly object to this viewpoint. Furthermore, the tendency toward scant, emotionally-impotent, and distinctly un-sexy depictions of love doesn’t register indifference; it registers disillusionment. I assert that a meaningful, distinct, and supportive correlation exists between love stories and nature-human stories in these texts. Where more nature is present, more love is present and vice versa. Where nature is less visible, love is less visible and vice versa. I use the term “ecology of love” to address these instrinsic links—the in between—between humans and nature. The first section of the thesis explores this phenomenon through the story and characters of an original novel excerpt. The second section discusses the reasons for banality, which involve social ennui and disillusionment, geographic obstacles, moral propriety, and the unique conditions that arise in a nation of immigrants. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This thesis examines the function and presentation of “Nature” in American literature written between 1945 and 1971. It argues that the widespread presence of ecological representations of “Nature” within Cold War literature has been critically overlooked, as a result of Cold War literary criticism’s comparatively narrow concentration on the direct effects of political and ideological metanarratives on texts. It uncovers a plethora of ecological portrayals of the relationship between the human and the environment, and reveals the significance of the role played by non-Western and non-Anglocentric philosophies and spiritualties in shaping these presentations. This study is methodologically informed by the most recent developments in the field of ecocriticism, including Scott Knickerbocker’s work on ecopoetics and Timothy Morton’s explorations of the problems associated with the term “Nature”. It finds significant continuities within these ecological portrayals, which suggest that nuclear discourse had an influential effect on the presentation of “Nature” within Cold War literature. This influence is, however, heavily mediated by the role that non-Western and non-Anglocentric philosophies play in writers’ theorisations of relations of interdependence between the human and the environment. Such literary presentations challenge the understanding that the Nuclear Age represents a conquest of “Nature”. Rather, they reveal that a number of Cold War writers present human interdependence within an ecological system, capable of the annihilation of the human, and of the containment of the new nuclear threat. The thesis’s introductory chapter questions the characterisation of Silent Spring (1962) as the founding text of the modern environmental movement. It outlines this study’s intervention into the field of Cold War criticism, detailing its specific ecocritical methodology and engaging with the legacy of Transcendentalism. Chapter One looks at the work of Paul Bowles, with a primary focus on The Sheltering Sky (1949). It demonstrates the centrality of the landscape to the writer’s creative project, and reveals the substantial influence of the Sufi mysticism on Bowles’s presentation of the human’s relationship to the environment. Chapter Two focuses on the work of the New Mexican poet Peggy Pond Church. It establishes the influence of the writer’s familiarity with the Pueblo Native American worldview on her poetic portrayals of the human and the nuclear as interrelated parts within a greater ecological system. It also uncovers similar portrayals within the work of the “father of the atomic bomb”, J. Robert Oppenheimer. The third chapter analyses the effects of Chinese and Japanese literature and thought on the work of J. D. Salinger. It outlines the function of “Nature” in the work of the specific translators that Salinger names, arguing that this translated Taoism substantially informed the ecological vision present across his oeuvre. Chapter Four explores the impact of Simone Weil on the work of Mary McCarthy. It reads Birds of America (1971), demonstrating the governing influence of Weil’s concept of “force” on McCarthy’s presentation of the human as an interdependent part within a powerful ecological system.

This dissertation examines the intersection between diasporic subjectivities and scientific knowledge production in the works of Shani Mootoo, Madeleine Thien, Larissa Lai, and Rita Wong. I read these authors as participating in a burgeoning scene of diasporic Canadian writing that draws on concepts and tropes derived from the life sciences to think through a broad constellation of issues relating to contemporary diasporic experience, from the role of biogenetic discourses in the diasporic search for ancestry, to the embodied dimensions of diasporic memory and trauma, to the role of diaspora communities in the decolonial struggle against the emergent forms of “biopower” that contemporary bioscience has enabled. As the first study to address this burgeoning topic in diasporic Canadian literature, this dissertation asks: Why are diasporic Canadian authors taking up bioscience as a key topos for the exploration of contemporary diasporic experiences? How is this engagement with the life sciences re-shaping current conversations about diasporic kinship, memory, and embodiment, and about the role of diasporic communities in contemporary struggles for environmental justice? Complicating frameworks that understand bioscience only as an instrument of what Foucault calls “biopower,” I argue that the works of Mootoo, Thien, Lai and Wong prompt us to rethink the ways in which queer, feminist, anti-racist, and environmental struggles might constructively interface with the life sciences to challenge emergent forms of biological essentialism and biopolitical control. I demonstrate that, by using bioscientific tropes to highlight the complex and open-ended life processes that shape the human body and the wider environment, these authors construct epistemologies that attend to the global networks of biopower through which neoimperialism operates while also acknowledging the interconnected ways in which living organisms and material substances destabilize these global flows. I argue that, in so doing, these authors position diasporic knowledge production as a crucial locus for the rethinking of relations between politics and ecology, and between humanist and scientific ways of knowing, that science studies scholars like Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour and decolonial critics like Boaventura de Sousa Santos have identified as a central to contemporary struggles for environmental justice. Each chapter explores the work of one diasporic Canadian author in relation to a single, historically specific site of scientific knowledge production. Chapter one examines how Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night combines notions of gothic excess with a materialist emphasis on the material agencies that inhere through bodies and environments in order to disrupt the gendered and racial discourses propagated by imperial botany. Chapter two explores how Thien’s novels Certainty and Dogs at the Perimeter draw on current debates around the neurobiology of memory and emotion to grapple, on one hand, with the fragmentation induced through diasporic trauma and, on the other, with the uncertainty of global risk culture. Chapter three examines how Lai’s Salt Fish Girl disrupts popular and scientific discourses concerning the genetic basis of diasporic ancestry to advance a model of kinship that is rooted not in a shared ethnic heritage, but in a shared immersion in a complex web of interactions that includes genetic, evolutionary, and environmental forces. Finally, chapter four examines how Rita Wong’s forage mobilizes contemporary debates around the spread of genetically modified organisms to stage a productive encounter between diasporic, Indigenous, and scientific knowledges. I argue that, in the process of engaging with these various scientific debates, these writers stage trenchant critiques of the colonial legacies and neo-imperial investments of contemporary bioscientific culture while also modeling more fruitful, ethical, and hopeful ways of engaging with scientific knowledge.

“La imagen de la mujer y la naturaleza en la música vasca” se enfoca en la visión ecocrítica del pueblo vasco presente en su cultura. En este caso, se analizarán dos canciones vascas de la época contemporánea para ello. Este trabajo ha surgido de una gran investigación, tanto por el aspecto ecocrítico como por el cultural. El análisis surge con intención de cubrir ese “vacío” que parece existir en la literatura europea con respecto a la visión ecocrítica de sus sociedades, utilizando la cultura vasca como base. En el trabajo se combinan tanto aspectos ecocríticos como culturales o incluso históricos con la intención de acercar las canciones vascas y su cosmología al lector, mostrando así no solo su singularidad sino también la interpretación de la sociedad de valores como la geoidentidad, el sentido de lugar o el ecofeminismo. Con este objetivo, se pretende por tanto, abrir una puerta hacia la ecocrítica en la literatura europea comenzando por una de las innumerables culturas insólitas del continente y acercando al mismo tiempo al resto la cultura vasca desde una visión más profunda y personal.