Focusing on ecocritical aspects throughout Chinese literature, particularly modern and contemporary Chinese literature, the contributors to this book examine the environmental and ecological dimensions of notions such as qing (情) and jing (境). Chinese modern and contemporary environmental writing offers a unique aesthetic perspective toward the natural world. Such a perspective is mainly ecological and allows human subjects to take a benign and nonutilitarian attitude toward nature. The contributors to this book demonstrate how Chinese literary ecology tends toward an ecological-systemic holism from which all human behaviors should be closely examined. They do so by examining a range of writers and genres, including Liu Cixin’s science fiction, Wu Ming-yi’s environmental fiction, and Zhang Chengzhi’s historical narratives. This book provides valuable insights for scholars and students looking to understand how Chinese literature conceptualizes the relationship between humanity and nature, as well as our role and position within the natural realm.

Arcadia Updated delves into the concept of landscape as it is shaped by the literary tradition and material works known as pastoral. Referring to several of the tradition’s works as well as scholarly critiques, Fiskevold and Geelmuyden highlight how individual landscape perception is primarily a cultural construct: each individual may see a unique landscape based on personal experiences, but simultaneously, landscape represents a tradition of engaging with nature and land, which has been largely forgotten. In re-engaging and connecting the practice of understanding landscapes with the pastoral tradition, the authors establish a common ground for treating landscape as an object of analysis in landscape planning. Arcadia Updated contributes to the methodological debate concerning landscape character assessment. Including 30 black-and-white images, this book analyses how humans engage with land organically, materially and communicatively. It seeks to raise landscape awareness as both an individual and a collective act of imagination. The practice of analysing landscapes is an ongoing culture of reinterpreting the land as landscape in response to society’s development and technical progress. The role of the landscape analyst is to interpret the contemporary world and offer visual explanations of it. This book will be beneficial to professional landscape planners as well as to academics and students of landscape, literature and cultural studies. It provides an essential contribution to the cross-disciplinarity of the landscape discourse.

John Banvilles works waver indecisively between modernism and postmodernism. This study offers a hitherto unexplored vista on his works and argues that Banville is a post-/modern pastoralist. The pastoral lens opens new vistas to Banville's central concerns: the collusion of ethics and aesthetics, self-identification in narrative, and the topography of the troubled mind. Banvilles characters harbour an Arcadia of the unconscious conditioned by a subtext of nostalgia. Caught in a crisis, his characters explore, subvert and transform the pastoral mode into an ambiguous quest for a stable self.

The study examines cultural effects of various colonial systems of government in the Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean in a little investigated period of transition: from the French Revolution to the abolition of slavery in Cuba (1789–1886). The comparison of cultural transfer processes by means of literary production from and about the Caribbean, embedded in a broader context of the circulation of culture and knowledge deciphers the different transculturations of European discourses in the colonies as well as the repercussions of these transculturations on the motherland’s ideas of the colonial other: The loss of a culturally binding centre in the case of the Spanish colonies – in contrast to France’s strong presence and binding force – is accompanied by a multirelationality which increasingly shapes hispanophone Caribbean literature and promotes the pursuit for political independence. The book provides necessary revision to the idea that the 19th-century Caribbean can only be understood as an outpost of the European metropolises. Examining the kaleidoscope of the colonial Caribbean opens new insights into the early processes of cultural globalisation and questions our established concept of a genuine western modernity. Updated and expanded translation of Die koloniale Karibik. Transferprozesse in hispanophonen und frankophonen Literaturen, De Gruyter (mimesis 53), 2012

This book examines the power definiteness of landscape from a social constructivist perspective with a particular focus on the importance of aesthetic concepts of landscape in development. It seeks to answer the question of how societal notions of landscape emerge, how they are individually updated and how these ideas affect the use and design of physical space. It also analyzes how physical manifestations of societal activity impact on understandings of individual and societal landscapes and addresses the essential aspect of the social construction of landscape, cultural specificity, which in turn is discussed in the context of the expansion of a western landscape concept. The book offers an unprecedented, comprehensive and detailed examination of societal power relations in the context of landscape development. The numerous case studies from the physical manifestation of modern spatial planning in the United States, the power discourses concerning the design of model railway landscapes, and the medial production of stereotypical landscape notions shed light on the complex and multilayered interactions of collective and individual landscape references. It is a valuable resource for geographers, sociologists, landscape architects, landscape planners and philosophers.