Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice

Coming into Contact plays at the rich, diverse, productive edges of ecocritical theory and praxis as it effectively opens the field of literature-and-environment studies to dynamic new approaches and international literatures. Contributors to the volume map multicultural literatures from India to Japan to America and chart previously unexamined places including swamps, internment camps, and sites of cultural displacement. Readers, writers and scholars will find ground-shifting new discussions of the precautionary principle, ecological restoration, global biosurveillance, biological taxonomy, geology and evolutionary biology right alongside compelling explication of how we might use the concept of recycling in the composition classroom and why songs about lynching in the segregated South will forever alter our understanding of pastoral theory. These essays boldly and assuredly take their place among those included in The Ecocriticism Reader and Beyond Nature Writing as they afford readers, writers, and scholars a deeper understanding of the contributions ecocriticism has made and is making to disciplines both inside and outside the humanities.

–Joni Adamson “Arizona State University at the Polytechnic Campus”

This exciting new collection of cutting-edge ecocritical essays is rich with diligent scholarship and passionate social commentary. These essays show the continuing vibrancy, good humor, analytical acuity, and activist commitment that have always characterized this field, while adding new theoretical subtlety.

–Scott Slovic “University of Nevada, Reno”

One of the delights of [Coming into Contact] introduces readers to a delicious smorgasbord of texts well beyond the canonical environmental writings.

—Ecology

ANN A. MERRILLis the Thomson Professor Emerita of Environmental Studies at Davidson College, where she taught in the English and Environmental Studies Departments for thirty years. She is coeditor of Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (Georgia) with Ian Marshall, Daniel J. Philippon, and Adam Sweeting. An avid gardener and flower enthusiast, she is committed to raising awareness about the crucial importance of plants both historically and today. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

IAN MARSHALL is professor of English and environmental studies at Penn State Altoona. He is the author, most recently, of Peak Experiences: Walking Meditations on Literature, Nature, and Need and the coeditor of Coming into Contact: Essays in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (Georgia).

DANIEL J. PHILIPPON is an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he is also director of the Program in Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Ethics. He is editor of a critical edition of Mabel Osgood Wright’s The Friendship of Nature and coeditor of the anthology The Height of Our Mountains.

ADAM W. SWEETING, the author of Beneath the Second Sun and Reading Houses and Building Books, is an associate professor of humanities at Boston University, College of General Studies.

TINA GIANQUITTO is an associate professor of literature in the Division of Liberal Arts and International Studies at the Colorado School of Mines.