This thesis is an examination of transformative effects of literature on environmental identity. The work begins by examining and expanding the Deep Ecology concept of identification-with-nature. The potential problems with identification through direct encounters are used to argue for the relevance of the possibility of identification-through-literature. Identification-through-literature is then argued for using the hermeneutic and narrative theories of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, as well as various examples of nature writing and fiction.

This dissertation presents an account of fugitivity in poetic form as well as political practice. In this account, fugitivity is an ecological strategy of resistance to enslavement, where ecology describes both the set of relations orchestrated between words on a page and the set of relations between species, including humans, on the plantation. In order to understand fugitivity as an ecological strategy, I examine the mutual imbrication of nascent theories of race and ecology in the long nineteenth century. I thus present two competing theories of race and ecology, each of which carries distinct poetic implications. The first, plantation poetics, is evident in poems written on and about plantations in the second half of the eighteenth-century. These poems, in their rigid poetic structures, reinforce the racial and ecological logics of the plantation, in which hierarchical relations between and within species are inherited from early natural histories, and are used to support both slavery and the monocultural cultivation of the plantation. In contrast to this system, I present a fugitive poetics that, sharing the theory of race and ecology as intertwined systems, turns that theory against the ends of the plantation and toward a poetics premised on shifting, porous relations, rather than hierarchies and containment. In so doing, I link fugitivity to a set of formal strategies that were fully operative in nineteenth-century poetics, ecological thought, and political resistance, and that remain relevant for political, ecological, and poetic thought to this day. Though this project follows a chronological trajectory, its aim is not to present a history of political resistance in the plantation era, nor even a history of poetic form in the nineteenth-century. Instead, it undertakes a strategic analysis of poetic form as necessarily linked to political resistance and to the long history of environmental racism. The first chapter establishes the colonialist poetic tradition I call plantation poetics, tied to maintenance of the ecological enclosure of the plantation. In the work of James Grainger, John Singleton, and Edward Rushton, I argue that the poetic line came to stand in for both the lines of the plantation and the delineation of racial hierarchy so yoked to the natural histories of the eighteenth century. The chapters that follow offer several different models of fugitive poetics, in the work of George Moses Horton and the editors of Freedom’s Journal, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Emily Dickinson, and Albery Allson Whitman. While each of these writers engages with ecology and political domination differently, all of them combine political and ecological investments to create a poetic project that resists the plantation poetics of colonization. The distinct strategies employed by each writer teach us what poetic strategies, and what fugitive practices, are best suited to our current moment of ecological and political crisis.

Gary Snyder has offered, in poems and essays, ways to acknowledge the interrelationships of humans with the more-than-human. He questions common notions of selfness as well as understandings of what it is to be human in relationship to other species and ecosystems, and he offers new paradigms for the relationship between cultures and the ecosystems in which these cultures reside. These new paradigms are rooted in a reevaluation of our attitudes toward our physical bodies which impacts our relationship to the earth and raises new possibilities for an ecological spirituality or philosophy. The sum of Snyder's endeavors is a foundation for an understanding of ecopoetics. Snyder's poem "The Trail is Not a Trail" is an interesting place to begin examining how human perceptions of the self are central to the kinds of relationships that humans believe are possible between our species and everything else. In this poem there is a curious fusion of the speaker and the trail. In fact, with each successive line they become increasingly difficult to separate. The physical self is central to Snyder's poetry because his is a poetry of the self physically rooted in ever-shifting relationship with the biosphere. The relationship of the self to the biosphere in Snyder's poetry also points toward a spiritual experience that can be called ecomysticism, by which I mean the space where new ecological paradigms and mystical understandings of the world overlap. Ecomysticism goes beyond mysticisms that describe a spiritual being longing for supernatural experience while being "unfortunately" trapped in a physical body. Ecomysticism emphasizes the spiritual and physical interrelatedness or interconnectedness of all matter, the human and the more-than-human. The integration of the spiritual and physical aspects of the self is only possible through an awareness of the interrelatedness of the self and the non-human. New paradigms for the self are thus central to ecopoetics, a poetics that seeks to heal the rift between humans and the biosphere.

At the end of the sixteenth century, London was grappling with an unprecedented environmental crisis: rapid population growth produced rampant pollution, land mismanagement, and epidemic disease; entire species of fish disappeared from the Thames; and the city’s growing demands for food and fuel depleted the nation’s natural resources. This dissertation locates innovative responses to these new environmental pressures on the early modern stage. Shakespeare and his contemporaries, I argue, shaped early attitudes and expectations about the ecology of London and its sustainability. Each chapter of “Urban Ecology” focuses on a different resource problem plaguing early modern London—food scarcity, decayed waterways, air pollution and a shortage of space to bury the dead—and shows how groups of plays addressed them using the material and imaginative resources of dramatic form. In constructing stories in which these ecological issues figure prominently, and in offering their own creative responses to these problems, early modern playwrights display a nuanced understanding of London’s environment as a co-fabrication between human and nonhuman forces, even before the terms “ecosystem” or “ecology” had emerged in scientific discourse. To make this co-fabrication visible, “Urban Ecology” reads early modern plays alongside a rich archive of archaeological evidence that re-situates the theater industry as a both a product of and active participant in the London ecosystem. I show how playing companies contributed to urban air pollution by burning noxious sea coal to produce spectacular effects that attracted paying customers; the Bankside playhouses, located on reclaimed marshland, were vulnerable to the Thames and its patterns of tidal flooding; and food sourced from both local and global supply chains was regularly sold during performances. By reconstructing this complex interplay between drama and its environment, this dissertation begins to center the early modern theater industry in the history of ecological thought.

Lam Yee Man. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 95-103). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.ii / Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter one: --- The anthropocentrism/ androcentrism debate --- p.10 / Chapter Chapter two: --- Self/ nature relationships: Self Realization and the relational self --- p.37 / Chapter Chapter three: --- the self/ nature relation in Wang's object- oriented poems --- p.53 / Conclusion --- p.82 / Endnotes --- p.86 / Bibliography --- p.95

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2001. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 239-250). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users. Address: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3024517.

'Aspects of Modern Scottish Literature and Ecological Thought' argues that the science and philosophy of 'ecology' has had a profound impact on Scottish literature since the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, and relates the work of successive generations of Scottish writers to concurrent developments in ecological thought and the environmental sciences. Chapter One suggests that, while Romantic ways of thinking about the natural world remained influential in nineteenth-century culture, new environmental theories provided fresh ways of perceiving the world, evident from the writings of Scottish mountaineers. Chapter Two explores the confrontation of modernity and wilderness in the fiction and travel writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, and some contemporaries such as John Muir. Chapter Three suggests that ecologically-sensitive local and global concerns, rather than 'national' ones per se, are central to the work of Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and others, while Chapter Four demonstrates that post-war 'rural' writers including Nan Shepherd, Neil Gunn, Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown, often viewed as peripheral, are actually central and of international relevance, and challenges the assumption that there is a fundamental divide between Scottish rural and urban writing. Finally, Chapter Five argues that contemporary writers John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie and Alan Warner are not only reviewing human relationships with nature, but also the role writing has to play in exploring and strengthening that relationship, helping to determine the ecological 'value' of poetry and fiction. By looking at Scottish literature through the lens of ecological thought, and engaging with international discourses of 'Ecocriticism', this thesis provides a fresh perspective in contrast to the dominant critical views of modern Scottish literature, and demonstrates that Scottish writing constitutes a heritage of ecological thought which, in this age of environmental awareness, should be recognised as not only relevant, but vital.

“The Pastoral Field: Local Ecologies in Early Modern Literature” excavates the ways in which pastoral literature registers the role nature-human interaction played in shaping protracted struggles over land use and ownership, and in the degradation and improvement of natural landscapes. Revising a longstanding critical tradition that understands early modern pastoral as primarily allegorical, the project instead insists that the form can also accommodate topical thinking about regional ecologies. Shifting the emphasis away from the Elizabethan court towards local agricultural politics, it unearths the ways in which natural crises such as flooding, famine, sheep rot, and soil degradation hastened processes of agricultural improvement and enclosure—and how those processes were in turn mediated, counter-factually imagined, and actively promoted within the literary devices of pastoral. Each of my four chapters locates pastoral plays, poems, romances, and country-house entertainments in the particular landscapes that shaped their development— landscapes that were, in turn, reconfigured by the literary and political concerns of Elizabethan authors.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, 2017 / This research report conducts a critical examination of Ayo Akinfe’s Fuelling the Delta Fires by paying attention to the writer’s use of satire to highlight social problems such as corruption, deception and exploitation in Nigeria. The focus is on how Akinfe’s novel represents exploitation, waste, and excess that have become normative in a country on the brink of collapse. The work also seeks to identify and critique how Akinfe employs satire to interrogate the syndrome of the ‘big-man’ in Nigeria, showing how their actions contribute to social decay and violence. The research will also examine issues of ecology in the Niger Delta. Ecology has often been construed as a Western ideology that has little resonance within the framework of the African novel. However, this work, tries to show that as the scholarship on ecological humanities has evolved over the years, African alternatives which take account of the unique challenges of the continent have also being developed. Akinfe draws from these proposed models of ecology to focus attention on the ecological issues that are a direct outcome of the exploration of oil in the Niger Delta and by so doing, brings attention to the transgressions of government and multinational corporations who go to great lengths to extract oil in the region. Applying ecocritical examples suggested by scholars like Anthony Vital, Byron Caminero-Santangelo and others, the research report demonstrates how literature has been used as a medium to expose greed that facilitates ecological degradations and how the culture of consumerism affect the daily lives of the inhabitants of the Niger Delta. / XL2018

This project focuses on the natural elements earth and water as presented in the works of African American author Toni Morrison. The primary texts analyzed are Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. In the first two novels, Morrison alludes to the abuse of black bodies by drawing parallels between the destruction of trees and the negative effects of urbanization. I argue that environmental destruction and urbanization parallels the disenfranchisement and killing of black bodies. Water in Beloved connotes bondage because of its historical link to the Triangular Trade. However, considering Morrison's frequent mention of water and the fugitives' constant need to drink, I argue that ingesting water symbolizes a need for psychological freedom. All of the novels that I have analyzed emphasize the complex connections between African Americans and nature. / by Pauline P. Anderson. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.