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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

"In the City I Long For": Discovering and Enfolding Urban Nature in Ontario Literature

Zantingh, Matthew January 2014 (has links)
This dissertation examines the literary archives of three Ontario cities – Windsor, Hamilton, and Toronto – to discover and enfold urban nature in our everyday lives. Beginning with a refusal to accept the popular notion that there is no nature in the city or that the city is separate from the natural world, I seek to engage with writers in these three cities to find representations of and engagements with the natural world in an urban setting. In the light of a growing environmental crisis marked by fossil fuel shortages, climate change, biodiversity decline, and habitat loss, this project is an attempt to craft a meaningful response from an ecocritical perspective. Central to this response are two key contentions: one, that the natural world is in the city, but we need to find ways to recognize it there; and, two, that the most efficacious and ethical way to respond to environmental crisis is to make this urban nature a part of our everyday lives by fostering attachments to it and protecting it, or, to put it differently, enfolding it into our human lives. Using literature, my project shows how the natural world is present in three Ontario cities and how writers like Di Brandt, John Terpstra, Phyllis Brett Young, and others are already including urban nature in their work. This work also addresses significant gaps in Canadian literary discourse which has tended to focus on wilderness or rural spaces and in ecocritical discourse which has also tended to eschew urban locations. This project adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to read a wide range of texts including fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, educational material, scientific publications, and others in order to encourage readers and citizens of Windsor, Hamilton, and Toronto to discover and enfold the urban nature present in those cities. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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