Ecocriticism, travel writing, popular literature and culture

_The Physiology of Love and Other Writings_ is the first English annotated collection of Mantegazza’s selected works. In my extensive introductory essay, Mantegazza’s hybrid contributions from fiction, travel-writing, and ethnography to physiology, medicine, and politics are reevaluated as instances of a proto-cultural-studies approach attuned to the cross-fertilization of disciplines and the circulation of ideas in a period of European intellectual history that defied the notion of specialization.
Table of contents:
The Physiology of Love
And Selections from:
On The Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of the Coca Plant and on Nervine Nourishment in General
One Day in Madeira
A Voyage to Lapland with my Friend Stephen Sommier
India
Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful
The Neurosic Century
The Tartuffe Century
Head: Or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds
Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament
The Year 3000: A Dream
The Psychology of Translation

Strident criticism since publication has failed to dampen enthusiasm for Bruce Chatwin’s The songlines (1987), which a quarter century later remains popular among visitors to Central
Australia and those interested in Aboriginal culture. Early critical reception was shaped by postcolonial theory during the emergence of Aboriginal land rights in Australia, and a
corresponding period of critical reflection for anthropologists. This led to significant themes and strengths of the text being overlooked, which are now being retrieved under the influence
of ecocriticism. As part of a research project aimed at helping Australian nonfiction writers to better tackle the writing of place, The songlines is read afresh for walking’s contribution to its
representation of a postcolonial geography. The narrative emerges as a peregrination, rather than as an example of Said’s orientalism, for which it was widely criticised. The preliminary results presented here highlight walking’s close relationship with place through embodiment, specifically its ability to help overcome the ‘filters’ through which humans view the world; in simple terms, when Chatwin walks, his prose talks. Walking enhances constructions of race and frontier, as well as underpinning the text’s thematic concern with place-making. The research provides new and valuable insights for writers of place, and promises a productive
critical reading of this popular work, notably as to walking’s role in the construction of an Australian identity. Building on theoretical interest in walking as a critical tool, the paper contends that walking be considered as one technique of a postcolonial ecocriticism.

As the first cultural history of the sea in medieval English literature, this book traces premodern myths of insularity from their Old English beginnings to Shakespeare's Tempest. Beginning with a discussion of biblical, classical and pre-Conquest treatments of the sea, it investigates how such works as the Anglo-Norman Voyage of St Brendan, the Tristan romances, the chronicles of Matthew Paris, King Horn, Patience, The Book of Margery Kempe and The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye shape insular ideologies of Englishness. Whether it is Britain's privileged place in the geography of salvation or the political fiction of the idyllic island fortress, medieval English writers' myths of the sea betray their anxieties about their own insular identity; their texts call on maritime motifs to define England geographically and culturally against the presence of the sea. New insights from a range of fields, including jurisprudence, theology, the history of cartography and anthropology, are used to provide fresh readings of a wide range of both insular and continental writings.

Details: http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=11797

Different forms of selfhood enacted in the TV and filmic endings of the anime Evangelion can be revealed by building on Donald Crafton’s typology of performance of/in animation of “embodied acting” and “figurative acting.” Embodied acting is “introverted,” and tends towards the production of modernistic, anthropomorphic individuals that appear to provide a sense of depth in their enactment of emotion through their individualized movement. Figurative acting, which repeats similar codes in varying combinations for different characters, is “extroverted,” as the codes appear shared between various characters, forcing a recognition of the surface location of the code for that emotion, on not in the character. As such, the interrelation and tension between these forms of performing selfhood play out in Evangelion: objects of human creation, the Eva-units, boldly display their agency as they exhibit shocking performances of embodied acting, the Eva-units appearing with the same autonomy as human individuals; on the other hand, humans are broken into parts, their psyche examined in pieces as they delve into their minds to find only more pieces of other characters, an interrogation of the constitutive codes of figurative acting—the examination of a potentially more ecologically oriented objecthood seen in the TV ending. However, the filmic ending departs from the optimistic embrace of objecthood and presents the harrowing vision of environmental catastrophe as it explores different individualisms, taking them to their world-ending climax.

Local and imperial, insular and expansive, both English yet British: geographically and culturally, the sea continues to shape changing models of Englishness. This volume traces the many literary origins of insular identity from local communities to the entire archipelago, laying open the continuities and disruptions in the sea's relationship with English identity in a British context. Ranging from the beginnings of insular literature to Victorian medievalisms, the subjects treated include King Arthur's struggle with muddy banks, the afterlife of Edgar's forged charters, Old English homilies and narratives of migration, Welsh and English ideas about Chester, Anglo-Norman views of the sea in the Vie de St Edmund and Waldef, post-Conquest cartography, The Book of Margery Kempe, the works of the Irish Stopford Brooke, and the making of an Anglo-British identity in Victorian Britain.

Details: http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13713

Resumen La ecocrítica es aún una escuela de crítica reciente y poco extendida entre los estudios literarios de América Latina y España. Dentro de su alcance, las investigaciones sobre la ecopoesía hispánica contemporánea apenas suman 55 fuentes hasta mayo de 2017. El 88,55% de estas ha tomado como objeto de estudio producciones de poetas latinoamericanos. Aun así el desarrollo de tales investigaciones es asimétrico, pues se ha concentrado en prácticas ecopoéticas procedentes de Chile (32,82%) y Perú (18,32%). Asimismo, se observa una tendencia a la redundancia, ya que autores como Steven White, Roberto Forns-Broggi y Niall Binns, y sus estudios, se han convertido en referencias capitales e indispensables, lo cual lleva a que otros ecocríticos (re)visiten producciones en específico y repitan algunos presupuestos, observaciones y apreciaciones. De ahí que sobresalgan los análisis sobre las producciones de Nicanor Parra, Ernesto Cardenal, Gioconda Belli, Homero Aridjis y Pablo Antonio Cuadra. No todas las prácticas de los poetas mencionados por los investigadores han sido abordadas con la misma profundidad y detenimiento metodológico: algunas se quedan en el nivel de la cita o referencia del poeta, un poema o un poemario, o bien del comentario general. Como temáticas analizadas predominan las relativas a los dones de la hospitalidad (16,50%), la celebración (14,56%) y el reparo (12,14%), así como a la devastación ecológica (12,14%). A modo de recomendaciones, se precisan seis opciones metodológicas que pueden llevar a los investigadores a efectuar un análisis poético desde la ecocrítica. Abstract The ecocriticism is a recent and not yet widespread critic school in literary studies in Latin America and Spain. Within their scopes, the research on Contemporary Hispanic poetry barely adds 55 sources until May 2017. 88,55% of these has productions of Latin American poets as subject of study. The development of such research is asymmetrical. It has concentrated on ecopoetic practices coming from Chile (32,82%) and Peru (18,32%). Also, a trend towards redundancy is observed, because authors like Steven White, Roberto Forns-Broggi and Niall Binns, and their studies, have become cardinal and essential references. This lead to other ecocritics (re)visit specific productions and repeat some assumptions, observations, and appreciations. Thus, analysis of the productions of Nicanor Parra, Ernesto Cardenal, Gioconda Belli, Homero Aridjis and Pablo Antonio Cuadra overload within geo-poetic map irregularity. Not all the practices of poets mentioned by researchers have been analyzed in the same detail or methodological deliberation: a plenty of them remains at level of a quote or reference of the poet, a poem or a poetry-book, either a general comment. The prevailing analyzed topics are those relating to the gifts of hospitality (16,50%), celebration (14,56%) and repair (12,14%), as well as the ecological devastation (12,14%). In the form of recommendations, six methodological options, which may lead to conduct researchers to a poetic analysis from the ecocriticism, are specified.

John Moore was a prolific and popular nature writer and radio presenter in England in the 20th Century.  His nature writing spanned a period of tremendous change in the countryside and how it was viewed both by authority and the general public from the early 1900s to the 1960s.  He is virtually forgotten now - this is, to my mind, a tremendous pity.  This thesis attempts to show that, as a writer, he was ahead of his time in respect of his understanding of ecology and the environment.

Dos suizos, dos libros, una única obsesión: la explotación del “oro negro” de la selva amazónica, en la época del auge cauchero en el Oriente de Bolivia. Con apenas unos meses de diferencia, Franz Ritz y Ernst Leutenegger trabajaron en la misma barraca gomera durante la primera década del siglo XX, y ambos publicaron luego sus recuerdos en su país natal. Son estos relatos que, traducidos por primera vez al español, nos propone descubrir aquí Lorena Córdoba. La mirada más entusiasta de Ritz y la visión más melancólica de Leutenegger evocan ambas tópicos de la fiebre cauchera en la selva boliviana: la dura vida en las barracas; la ley del más fuerte en un mundo donde el Estado está ausente; los enganches tramposos, las deudas hereditarias, la explotación de los indígenas. Sin embargo, estos relatos permiten ir más allá de los clichés y matizar en gran parte las visiones en blanco y negro sobre esta época crucial para la economía boliviana, la paulatina incorporación del Oriente al país y el destino también de los pueblos indígenas amazónicos. Con su lectura, la Historia gana en humanidad, en matices enriquecedores, en profundidad y credibilidad.

The Interdisciplinary Rhetoric of Ecocriticism and the Reinterpretation of The Tisza by Sándor Petőfi.
Ecocriticism is a new trend in the humanities which allows the interdisciplinary approach of literature involving not only sibling areas of study but those of the „hard” sciences as well. A good example of this dialogue is the utilization of certain terms that used to be applied by natural or social scientists, like „ecosystem”, „niche”, „sustainability”, which seem to be at first sight only the symptoms of current fashion, but may also invite special, unusual viewpoints in the approach of literary (or other cultural) products. The present paper attempts to demonstrate this via the interpretation of a very well known and appraised Hungarian poem The Tisza written by Sándor Petőfi in which the newly fashionable term „tipping point” is used to highlight new angles of the work of art. In this approach the „tipping point” is seen as an invisible focal point of the poem that connects not only the flood of the eponymous river and the coming revolution of 1848 augurated by the poet, but also the social-economical antecedents of the revolution and the plans for the regulation of the river bed that began at the time when the poem was written. When analysing these connections, the celebrated rhetoric of the poem is demonstrated to involve not only formal and superficial similarities between the land and the social situation of its politically oppressed inhabitants, but is shown to reflect on the economical and power relations they are equally embedded in and determined by.

Over the last decade, ecocriticism – broadly defined, the study of the relationship between language or
art and the physical environment1 – has come to the fore in China, particularly in humanities departments,
leading to an outpouring of critical articles, books, and specialized studies. Possible reasons for why ecocriticism has gained traction within the university are the increasing hybridization and cross-disciplinarity within literature departments, where media/film, social science, literature, and
philosophy increasingly interact, and increased anxiety over environmental issues as amplified in the media. By cutting across several disciplines and media platforms, in only a few short years, ecocriticism has developed into a legitimate, and powerful, school of thought. The first section of this paper provides a brief overview of the recent history of the ecocritical “movement” in China – focusing on ways in which literary critics have developed ecocriticisminto a vibrant discourse. The second half addresses social ecology, a specific branch of ecocriticism, and its relevance to themes of alienation and modernization
active in the work of avant-garde directors and ecological activists. While Chinese academics have been reluctant to address social and political themes through an ecocritical lens, in the coming years, we should find greater attention paid, both on the left and on the right, to issues of environmental justice and ecological community.

Après une brève comparaison entre l'écocritique américaine (Glotfelty et Fromm, Buell) et l'écocritique française (Stéphanie Posthumus, Alain Suberchicot), cette communication a pour but d'explorer les plus récents travaux sur le paysage en philosophie et en géographie (Alain Roger, Augustin Berque) et de questionner la notion d' « artialisation » (Roger) avec celles d' « écoumène » et de « médiance ».

En explorant brièvement les travaux de Michel Collot sur le paysage littéraire, la dernière partie de cette communication vise à questionner les méthodes et enjeux d'une lecture écocritique des paysages littéraires.

Julio C. Tello, a Peruvian archaeologist, ascertained that the valuable environmental knowledge gained by Peru's pre-Hispanic civilisations equally had contemporary significance for a modernising and industrialising nation. This article explores how his findings on Peru's pre-Hispanic civilisations informed his understanding of their environmental relations, resource use and, furthermore, how he identified himself with some of the national discourses prevalent during the 1920s and 1930s. My analysis particularly links with arguments concerning Peruvian national identity and the importance of clean water supplies and biodiversity.
  Tello's field notes that comprised his book, Arqueología de Cajamarca: Expedición al Marañon – 1937, being the northern region of the Marañon River-basin, is the principal narrative informing this discussion. The focus is on Tello's uncovering of antique water channels-acequias and an aqueduct, leading him toward an alternative environmental conclusion that was multi-functional. His field notes are explored as 'travel writing' for its exciting heterogeneous capabilities for socio-environmental commentary. As Tello's writings contributed toward processes of decolonisation in Peru, understood as a challenge to the dominance of Eurocentrism, this discussion engages with the notion of "coloniality of power" - a concept developed by social theorists such as Aníbal Quijano and Walter D. Mignolo as to how Peruvian culture and history have been mainly defined by colonial, imperial and global processes.

Caves are explored in three different perspectives: recreation, biology, and meaning. In 2007 the European introduced White-Nose Syndrome started it's rampage on hibernating bat species in North America. In 2009 John Jones tragically dies while recreating in Nutty Putty cave. The piece uses my own caving experience with a man who was involved with the failed rescue attempt at Nutty Putty in 2007 to elucidate the connections that these two events have. The piece asks questions about meaning. What do caves mean ecologically? What do Bats mean ecologically? What do caves mean for us both ecologically and culturally? Finally it examines what options we have when faced with death in the dark places of our world, and what that means for the surface.

Labelled as the “novel of denunciation” since the early twentieth century, Liu E’s
The Travels of Lao Can is famous for its condemnation of “uncorrupted officials,”
or qingguan, who did not tolerate bribery but who, nevertheless, pursued official
prestige at the expense of the people. This novel, however, curiously begins with the
fables about the governance of the Yellow River and a defence for Qing collaborators,
or hanjian. What is the aim of such a narrative design? And in what sense is such
design meaningful to our understanding of Liu E the author and the novel itself ? This
study shows that the Yellow River floods since the mid-nineteenth century not only
reshaped the landscape of northern China, but also helped frame the way Liu E, a
river engineer and a novelist, looked at his world. The novel’s criticism of qinguan,
Liu E’s frustration in serving as comprador and his infamy as a hanjian should be
understood in terms of their relation to the Yellow River floods, and Liu E’s hydraulic
approach in flooding control.

上個世紀初以來，被歸類為「譴責小說」的《老殘遊記》，一向以批評剛愎自用、殘酷
嚴苛的清官聞名。然而，這樣一部以清官批評為主軸的小說，卻是以治理黃河與為
漢奸辯護的寓言作為開頭。這樣的敘事安排有何作用？而這一安排對於我們理解作
者劉鶚以及《老殘遊記》又有何意義？本文指出，十九世紀中期以後的黃河氾濫，不
只重塑了華北的地理景觀，也形塑了劉鶚認識世界的視野。無論是《老殘遊記》所批
判的清官問題，或者劉鶚在現實中所遭遇到的困境與「漢奸」罵名，無一不與黃河氾
濫，以及劉鶚對於黃河問題的應對策略密切相關。小說不只揭示清官、漢奸與黃河
是小說最關切之處，同時也說明了三者之間密不可分的關係。

Black Hole’s horrific elements combined with the metonymic capabilities of the comics format and Charles Burns’ unique drawing style allow Burns to portray the ecological in Black Hole without reducing it into anthropocentric metaphors. To further analyze Burns’s formal achievements, it is important to overlap metonymic theories of images and comics with ecocritical analyses of metonymy in prose literature. The uncanny, abject, and unquantifiable qualities of Black Hole’s metonymic juxtapositions serve to resist the one-way street of metaphor in which nature is reduced to symbols.

Published in Guatemala in 1938, Romelia Alarcón de Folgar’s poetry collection, Llamaradas, features a poetic voice who takes the form of a tree, ostensibly the ceiba, or Maya World Tree.  Marrying images both from Maya tradition and Western modernity, this speaker-tree embodies the utopian aspects of mestizaje in that it privileges both indigenous and European cultures at the expense of neither.  Moreover, insofar as the only “characters” in the collection are elements of nature, the collection also communicates an early environmentalist ethic that found resonance in the traditional Maya world view.  Llamaradas is thus a significant text that showcases a woman’s contributions to conservationism and mestizaje, two cultural discourses that distinguish Central American intellectual circles of the 1930s.  This article, which provides a cultural history of Central American conservationism, can serve as a platform for future scholarship on Central America’s conservationist history and women’s participation in Latin American environmental movements.

A meditative contribution to the literature on Rumi/Mevlana, city of Konya, the gendered concept of flâneur and flâneuse, the revival of "quest after knowledge" known as rihla fi talab al-‘ilm as part of contemporary travel literature in a non-Western context.

In the climate of early nineteenth-century negotiation over Anglo-American cultural relations, pleasure acquires added significance in Washington Irving's whimsical and touristic assortment of short stories and accounts of people, places and customs on both sides of the Atlantic, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1820). With its mannered, often sentimental departure from the provocative and satirical tenor of Irving's earlier writings, The Sketch Book appears designed to please, or to ingratiate the author with British reviewers who were still, at that time, dismissive of the very idea of American literature.
However, as a close reading of the diminutive sketch 'A Sunday in London' indicates, Irving's is a subtly layered, nuanced text, which exhibits a sophisticated understanding of English culture as being not simply a monolithic institution, to be encountered as such by the aspiring writer of the new American republic, but a fractured and fractious entity, defined as much by internal conflict as through a relationship with the new World other. 'A Sunday in London' produces from within its diminutive form and apparent quietude an immense power of suggestion, through the ambivalent image of London-as -Babylon. Irving's distinctly Cockneyist hymn of praise for the suburban pleasure garden, with its echo of radical dissent, similarly disturbs the surface effect of touristic affability. Consequently, there is a lot more to Irving's Sketch Book than Anglophile conservatism, just as there is more to Geoffrey Crayon's idea of pleasure than a strategic desire to please.

Du croquis à la peinture à l’huile, restées à l’état original ou diffusées par l’intermédiaire de la gravure, seules ou en conjonction avec le récit viatique, les images du voyage en Orient véhiculent une image riche en contrastes et souvent ambivalente. Au siècle des Lumières, de l’Acropole et des Pyramides d’Égypte aux vestiges de l’Empire byzantin et aux prestiges de la Cour ottomane, il s’agit d’autant d’images apparemment disparates, mais qui proposent un regard nouveau sur l’Orient méditerranéen. Source d’inspiration et de réflexion pour les artistes et les architectes, les images viatiques, qui alimentèrent les débats artistiques de l’époque, sont un ensemble précieux et irremplaçable pour le géographe, l’historien, l’ethnologue et le littéraire. Dans une approche thématique de l’Orient méditerranéen, cet ouvrage traite successivement du paysage, de l’histoire naturelle, des vestiges antiques, de l’architecture moderne et des populations. Il s’attarde, en outre, sur les analogies, les divergences et la complémentarité des images viatiques françaises avec celles d’autres voyageurs notamment britanniques. Si l’iconographie viatique du XVIIIe siècle a repris et développé des stéréotypes existants, elle fut le témoignage d’un orientalisme précoce, original, coloré d’anciennes rêveries sur l’Orient des merveilles renouvelées par la civilisation ottomane et procurant aux restes de la Belle Antiquité le vernis de la nostalgie.

Scots were among the most widely-traveled people in eighteenth-century Britain, often recording their experiences of cross-cultural contact in their public and personal writing. The chapter will provide a detailed examination of the response of Scottish women to West Indian slavery, a practice in which many Scots were deeply implicated. In particular, this chapter will discuss the Caribbean-Scottish relations explored in the travel accounts of two women: Janet Schaw (born ca. 1740) and Maria Ridell née Woodley (1772-1808). Based on her experiences in the West Indies in the 1770s, Schaw’s Journal of a Lady of Quality recounts the author’s personal contacts with West Indians and Scottish settlers. Not intended for publication, her journal explores the peculiarly Scottish dimension of West Indian life, seeking to clarify and defend the existing practice of slavery perpetrated by fellow Scots of “quality.” Schaw emerges in the Journal as an unwilling witness to slavery, a woman whose class status prevented her from establishing any sympathetic connection with the slaves she encountered. In this respect, Schaw’s Journal offers an alternative account of Caribbean-Scottish relations than has been typically expressed in the proto-abolitionist verse of her contemporary Scots. Two decades after Schaw’s Journal, Maria Riddell recorded her experiences as a young woman in the West Indies; her narrative Voyages to the Madeira and Leeward Caribbean Isles (1792) offers a much different viewpoint on the practice of slavery. Unlike the personal nature of Schaw’s Journal, Riddell sought to illustrate and assess life in the West Indies through a more “scientific” style of observation and description. This stylistic quality lends her Voyages a more distanced perspective on slavery, not yet presenting a fully-voiced critique of its practice but also disavowing the studied obliviousness of Schaw’s Journal. This chapter will examine this change in the perception of slavery from Schaw to Riddell, addressing the changing points of contact and departure in Caribbean-Scottish relations evidenced in the texts. It also offers the first critical analysis of Riddell’s Voyages, exploring in depth an important text that continues to be neglected in discussions of Scottish women’s travel literature. By examining the cross-cultural responses of Schaw and Riddell to life in the West Indies, the chapter will reveal the complex, often ambivalent reaction of Scottish women to Scotland’s role in a burgeoning British empire that was dependent upon slavery.

Colloque international Récits de voyage et ecritures de soi enAfrique coloniale et postcoloniale : cheminement individuel et formation d’une conscience sociale et politique nationale, Université Omar Bongo, 27-29 novembre 2018, org. Frédéric Mambenga.

In the framework of contemporary ecocritical and posthumanist theories, this comparative analysis of works by Paolo Mantegazza, Ouida, and Vernon Lee focuses on the conflictual relationship of proximity and differentiation at stake in the human-animal distinction in a post-Darwinian context dominated by the rise of experimental sciences. A discussion of vivisection and animal taming prompted by anthropocentric works as Mantegazza's _Fisiologia del dolore_ and _Upilio Faimali_ in tension with pro-animal essays by Ouida and Vernon Lee shows how the animal, caught between pure inert materiality and idealization, emerges as an intrinsic lack that the human fills with contending rational, utilitarian, moral, and affective motivations.

Abstract for a paper that was supposed to be delivered at the 25th European Conference on South Asian Studies (ECSAS), 24th-27th July, 2018, Paris, FRANCE.
Short paper abstract: One of South Asia's lesser-known (despite his phenomenal success in Bangladesh) fictional detectives, Misir Ali, is also a figure drawn to the supernatural and paranormal. This paper will seek to engage with his commitment to Reason, while exploring the links between Nature and fantasy in his cases.

NETWORK ON TRAVEL WRITING TO
THE ROMANTIC FAR NORTH 1800-1900
The focus is on how the Romantic North was rediscovered though Romantic historicism,
Antiquarianism and travelling European “men of science and letters” 1800-1900. Furthermore, how polymath travellers and expeditions pursued antiquarian interests alongside scientific interests, especially with regard to the republication of Nordic and Celtic literatures in Europe.

We want to explore new aspects of how travelling European scientists, philologists, ”gentlemen scholars” and expeditions combined leisure, pleasure, exploration and the advancement of knowledge; how these travels had a lasting impact on the formation of cultural memory and the making of Nordic cultural heritage in the Romantic Far North; and gendered connotations of these cultural encounters.

Furthermore, we encourage object-oriented and environmental approaches as well as post-disciplinary studies, both situated within and traversing the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and the arts. This way, the network aims to cultivate current streams of thought, while also providing space for new pathways and disparate voices and bodies as a means of approach towards new knowledge.

We will explore how foreign travel literature played a distinct role in affecting the tenor of
19th-century thought and left an indelible mark on science, literature and art.

The prevailing idea behind this network stipulates that the international contacts, inspirational impulses and cross-currents found in travel writing are still largely marginalized in cultural heritage, art, science and also in disciplines such as literary studies, history, ethnology and other related fields. New research clearly indicates that travel writing is at the heart of a nation’s conception of self, and most disciplines utilize these sources in some capacity.

The idea of the North and the Arctic has been a powerful part of the image of these areas, since travellers were a part of forming the key building block of the historical self-image of these areas.

The presentation traces the recent establishment and development of the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES). Having arisen initially out of the kindred, though largely distinct, scholarly discourses of ecocriticism and environmental history, the network soon developed a model of cross-cutting research cooperation spanning a wider and more heterogeneous constellation of subject areas, scholarly discourses and scientific domains. Responding to a widely perceived need for a more fully interdisciplinary field of environmental studies in the humanities, NIES has also become a meaningful vehicle for the organization of the environmental humanities in Northern Europe (the Nordic countries in particular). The network offers one noteworthy model for the further development of this emergent field in its emphasis on project-driven and increasingly team-organized collaborative research, as well as in its ambitions to promote the equitable engagement of scholars from the arts and humanities together with scientists from the social sciences and the natural sciences in the production of new knowledge pertaining to environment and society.  NIES’s distinctly integrative form of engagement in new initiatives of research, education and public outreach has been described, perhaps most aptly, as a _post-disciplinary_ approach to environmental studies.

This paper investigates Oroko Ideology as a thought system that is based on the unity of all things in the universe, prompting all that exists to exist. It seeks to establish a clear deviation where necessary from European or Western notions of existentialism, proving the negation of especially Sartrean and Kierkegaardian individualism in the African thought system as well as to establish the substantial seams that may be the node between African and Western notions of existence and reality. A number of philosophical notions among the Oroko people of Cameroon have been studied to provide an understanding of the people’s worldview as that which tilts on the appreciation of the universe as a cosmic family in which existence is based on the congruence of all things and not simply on the understanding of an existential self. The main conceptual referent in this paper is the concept of existentialism as proposed by several existential philosophers and from this paper’s novel concept of metacommunality. A number of written literature has been consulted to give the notions herein observed unity with other thought systems or parity where need be.
Key terms: existentialism, metacommunity, metacommunality, metacommunal existentialism, the Oroko people.

The essays gathered in In Transit focus on issues arising from the historical nexus between travel and imperialism. Contributors investigate the ways in which specific imperial projects were inextricably linked to developments in travel technologies and practices. At the same time, this collection reveals that imperial fantasies of exploration and conquest, whether actualized or not, irrevocably shaped the formulation of travel as a category of modern experience, as a rite/right of passage, and as a type of embodied knowledge. This dynamic, reciprocal relationship between imperialism and travel is examined in relation to written and pictorial documents produced at different historical moments and across a broad range of geographical locations, including India, Borneo, the Caribbean, South Africa, Australia, Britain, Polynesia, and Papua New Guinea.

This article links Jungian literary criticism on archetypes with contemporary postcolonial theories on colonial discourse in travel writing (David Spurr) and the worlding of a colonized land (Gayatri Spivak) in order to understand the pattern of images in European travel writing that created the fiction of Malaya. This fiction is created through a process of worlding by European travelers from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. The practice of Islam and magic among the Malays was represented as contributing to the degeneration of Malaya. The resulting image is that of an Eden that has fallen into ruin and that needs to be transformed back into paradise by the white man. T his article aims to unravel the pattern of images behind representation of Malaya in European travel writing from colonial times. It focuses on the recurrent archetypal image of a ruined Eden that needs to be restored by the white man. It becomes clear through the analysis of selected travel narratives by Portuguese, Dutch, and British writers that the archetype of a ruined Eden is assisted by tropes of colonial rheto

Alle teorie che si sono mosse da una critica delle visioni essenzialiste della letteratura e della realtà, l’uso discorsivo del termine “natura” è apparso uno dei bersagli critici più urgenti. In quanto mezzo privilegiato di legittimazione dell’umano attraverso il non-umano, la parola è diventata un luogo inevitabilmente conflittuale in cui smascherare strategie politiche e individuare istanze ideologiche. La convinzione che la realtà sia prodotto di una costruzione (linguistica, sociale) è stata però sfidata in maniera non banale dall’ecocriticism che, non rinunciando a identificare nella natura una mediazione, ha insistito sulla «generale presenza fisica che è un lato di questa mediazione» (Gifford). Un approccio simile pone interrogativi molto seri riguardo all’emergenza letteraria della natura – quale la delinea Raymond Williams – in quanto mondo materiale fra Illuminismo e Romanticismo, quando l’oggetto di osservazione tende a identificarsi con il modo di osservazione, la Natura con la Ragione, e si afferma la possibilità di opporre all’esistente stato di società un edenico stato di natura. In questo contesto di riscoperta delle periferie europee poco antropizzate, il Viaggio in Dalmazia di Alberto Fortis riscuote ampio successo, fornendo da una parte un innovativo saggio di storia naturale e un modello al viaggio scientifico, dall’altra facendosi racconto dell’incontro roussoviano con i “semi-barbari” Morlacchi nel loro habitat naturale, colpendo l’immaginazione di Goethe, Herder, Mérimé e dando vita al filone letterario del “morlacchismo”. La critica letteraria ha il più delle volte privilegiato il secondo aspetto attraverso una lettura decisamente antropocentrica: una dimensione che però può essere a mio avviso messa in discussione, o perlomeno complicata, dalla nozione di “scrittura della natura” promossa dall’ecocriticism.

This article analyses the forms in which women have represented their displacements through diverse territories using the crónica genre, even when the travel as theme is not necessarily the narrative focus. The cases studied here are not based on the experience of traveling for pleasure or tourism, and therefore this study identifies differences between recent female travel writing and travel writing that traditionally has been produced by a professional travel chronicler, usually a man. The article compares two chronicle collections: Banco a la sombra, by María Moreno and Cuando llegaron los bárbaros, by Magali Tercero. It proposes that the motivation for traveling, in the case of these women authors, is more related to a personal, creative or professional search and less to an authorial intention of producing a crónica de viajes (travel chronicle). It is concluded that in order to narrate displacements within the current globalized context, Latin American women chroniclers employ modern discourse strategies, such as melodrama and nostalgic evocations, which allows them to express affective bonds with specific territories, communities and subjects during their travels.

How can film become a tool of ‘conservation of remembrance’ and be a part of rescuing and rebuilding of cultural and communal memories? Taking a cue from recent ecologically oriented debate on modernity, this paper will focus on memories through films on rural localities that intently counter the trauma of urban migration and dislocation in and around local ‘dwellings.’  By looking at recent Chinese films like Dai Sijie’s Little Chinese Seamstress and Huo Jianqi’s Postmen in the Mountains, I discuss the directors’ emotive re-imaging of local and folk architecture and landmarks so as to dispel feelings of displacement resulted from frenzied urban booming, and posit an emotive ‘embedding’ linking urban migrants to their nostalgic home dwellings. These visual narratives consciously negotiate over the emotive terrains between memoirs of local landscape and nagging issues of poverty and backwardness, between tourist exoticism and ‘emotion pictures,’ between progress and preservation, and between the lure of global consumer culture and the beckoning of local and nascent ‘dwellings.’