“Deep time” is a term which attempts to capture temporal scales far beyond human comprehension. These are stretches of time epitomised by geological and cosmic scale processes, vast enough to make the entirety of human existence appear as little more than a footnote. The past few years have seen a boom in texts dedicated to the study of deep time, extending across a broad range of disciplines which fall markedly outside of its geological roots. These studies are unified by two ideas in particular: that deep time thinking and ecocriticism should be considered in conjunction, and that literature and the arts play a vital role in fostering a deep time awareness. Digressions in Deep Time is the first collection of essays which considers the multifarious representations of deep time across literature and the arts, assembling the work of a wide range of prominent scholars whose research frequently engages with temporality and ecocriticism. Featured contributions include work by the Pulitzer-prize winning author John McPhee, who popularised the term deep time in the late seventies, as well as chapters by Richard Irvine (author of An Anthropology of Deep Time), Benjamin Morgan (author of The Outward Mind) and Andrew Tate (author of Apocalyptic Fiction).

Religious Horror and the Ecogothic explores the intersections of Anglophone Christianity and the Ecogothic, a subgenre that explores the ecocritical in Gothic literature, film, and media. Acknowledging the impact of Christian ideologies upon interpretations of human relationships with the environment, the Ecogothic in turn interrogates spiritual identity and humanity’s darker impulses in relation to ecological systems. Through a survey of Ecogothic texts from the eighteenth century to the present day, this book illuminates the ways in which a Christianized understanding of hierarchy, dominion, fear, and sublimity shapes reactions to the environment and conceptions of humanity’s place therein. It interrogates the discourses which inform environmental policy, as well as definitions of the “human” in a rapidly changing world.

Ecocritical Menopause: Women, Literature, Environment, “The Change” is the first volume of its kind to bring together cross-sectional ecofeminist voices privileging women’s menopausal positionality within literary works. This collection reexamines menopause across the disciplinary fields of ecofeminism and ecocriticism as clearly the most neglected phase of the menstrual cycle and aims to develop a critical discourse in counterpoint to the persistent cultural and critical legacies that sustain underrating women in midlife. In highlighting selected literary representations of female being in transition, this volume includes: • Exploration of the core motifs mediating the fashioning of menopausal women, including biology, the body, body shaming, climacterium, hysteria, the crone/hag figure, femininity, gender, identity, reproduction, sexlessness and asexuality • Reexamination of histo-cultural biases that continue to perpetuate a devaluation of women after menopause, such as ageism, degeneration, loss of fertility and myths of essentialism, patriarchy and hegemony, social taboos, the medicalization of menopause, and cultural “menophobia” • Analysis of literature genres in which we find portraitures of peri/post/menopause subjectivity, such as autofiction, crime fiction, detective fiction, folktales, frame tale, fiction, mystery, poetry, short story, and the “whodonit.”

How did the earth look in prehistoric times? Scientists and artists collaborated during the half-century prior to the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species to produce the first images of dinosaurs and the world they inhabited. Their interpretations, informed by recent fossil discoveries, were the first efforts to represent the prehistoric world based on sources other than the Bible. Martin J. S. Rudwick presents more than a hundred rare illustrations from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the implications of reconstructing a past no one has ever seen.

With studies of, amongst others, Miguel de Cervantes, Anton Chekhov, Charles Baudelaire and Henry James, this landmark collection of essays is a unique and wide-ranging exploration and celebration of the many forms of digression in major works by fifteen of the finest European writers from the early modern period to the present day.

An unprecedented eyewitness account of the New York School, as seen between the lines of O'Hara's poetry Joe LeSueur lived with Frank O'Hara from 1955 until 1965, the years when O'Hara wrote his greatest poems, including "To the Film Industry in Crisis," "In Memory of My Feelings," "Having a Coke with You," and the famous Lunch Poems—so called because O'Hara wrote them during his lunch break at the Museum of Modern Art, where he worked as a curator. (The artists he championed include Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Rauschenberg.) The flowering of O'Hara's talent, cut short by a fatal car accident in 1966, produced some of the most exuberant, truly celebratory lyrics of the twentieth century. And it produced America's greatest poet of city life since Whitman. Alternating between O'Hara's poems and LeSueur's memory of the circumstances that inspired them, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara is a literary commentary like no other—an affectionate, no-holds-barred memoir of O'Hara and the New York that animated his work: friends, lovers, movies, paintings, streets, apartments, music, parties, and pickups. This volume, which includes many of O'Hara's best-loved poems, is the most intimate, true-to-life portrait we will ever have of this quintessential American figure and his now legendary times.

In the lusty and turbulent world of Enlightenment Scotland, he set out to prove it.".