This book is the first truly interdisciplinary intervention into the burgeoning field of Irish ecological criticism. Providing original and nuanced readings of Irish cultural texts and personalities in terms of contemporary ecological criticism, Flannery’s readings of Irish literary fiction, poetry, travel writing, non-fiction, and essay writing are ground-breaking in their depth and scope. Explorations of figures and texts from Irish cultural and political history, including John McGahern, Derek Mahon, Roger Casement, and Tim Robinson, among many others, enable and invigorate the discipline of Irish cultural studies, and international ecocriticism on the whole. This book addresses the need to impress the urgency of lateral ecological awareness and responsibility among Irish cultural and political commentators; to highlight continuities and disparities between Irish ecological thought, writing, and praxis, and those of differential international writers, critics, and activists; and to establish both the singularity and contiguity of Irish ecological criticism to the wider international field of ecological criticism. With the introduction of concepts such as ecocosmopolitanism, "deep" history, ethics of proximity, Gaia Theory, urban ecology, and postcolonial environmentalism to Irish cultural studies, it takes Irish cultural studies in bracing new directions. Flannery furnishes working examples of the necessary interdisciplinarity of ecological criticism, and impresses the relevance of the Irish context to the broader debates within international ecological criticism. Crucially, the volume imports ecological critical paradigms into the field of Irish studies, and demonstrates the value of such conceptual dialogue for the future of Irish cultural and political criticism. This pioneering intervention exhibits the complexity of different Irish cultural and historical responses to ecological exploitation, degradation, and social justice.

Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature analyzes a wide range of Irish literature whose themes tie into a reverence for the natural world of Ireland. From an ecocritical perspective, these works, tied into an understanding of the landscape and particular aspects of nature, attain a fresh new meaning and foster a more relevant reflection of Ireland’s beautiful literary landscape. The analysis begins with the first Irish writers, the hermit poets, and examines the ways in which the Irish hermit and saint were connected spiritually, through both pagan and early Christian values, to the natural world. The book then examines Irish literature from the perspective of the deforested landscape and the landscapes of farmland, divided property, famine, ruins, and a threatening natural world. Following the Famine, the book moves on to explore the establishment of the pastoral dream in this loss of landscape, and a re- connection to nature through the writers of the Irish Literary Renaissance. From there, the analysis shifts to the nature writing of Ireland’s islands, including nature and community on Achill Island, storytelling on the Aran Islands, exile in nature on Skellig Michael, and the mythmaking of the Great Blasket Island. Moving north and into the twentieth century, Emerald Green focuses on four nature poets from Northern Ireland: Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Longley; all four are redeemed by nature through their returns to the rural landscape of Ireland’s west coast. The book concludes with an examination of modern Irish environmental writers and naturalist poets, as well as journalists weighing in on current environmental concerns in Ireland. Emerald Green concludes with an assessment of the future of nature in Ireland, and how the significant reduction of this country’s natural landscape will alter its literary landscape as well.

In Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin examine relationships between humans, animals and the environment in postcolonial texts. Divided into two sections that consider the postcolonial first from an environmental and then a zoocritical perspective, the book looks at: narratives of development in postcolonial writing entitlement and belonging in the pastoral genre colonialist 'asset stripping' and the Christian mission the politics of eating and representations of cannibalism animality and spirituality sentimentality and anthropomorphism the place of the human and the animal in a 'posthuman' world. Making use of the work of authors as diverse as J.M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Jamaica Kincaid and V.S. Naipaul, the authors argue that human liberation will never be fully achieved without challenging how human societies have constructed themselves in hierarchical relation to other human and nonhuman communities, and without imagining new ways in which these ecologically connected groupings can be creatively transformed.

Wall critically examine seven contemporary Irish writers in their shared Western context, showing the ways in which the region has influenced and shaped their work.

The vast majority of existing ecocritical studies, even those which espouse the “postcolonial ecocritical” perspective, operate within a first-world sensibility, speaking on behalf of subalternized human communities and degraded landscapes without actually eliciting the voices of the impacted communities. Ecocriticism of the Global South seeks to allow scholars from (or intimately familiar with) underrepresented regions to “write back” to the world’s centers of political and military and economic power, expressing views of the intersections of nature and culture from the perspective of developing countries. This approach highlights what activist and writer Vandana Shiva has described as the relationship between “ecology and the politics of survival,” showing both commonalities and local idiosyncrasies by juxtaposing such countries as China and Northern Ireland, New Zealand and Cameroon. Much like Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development, this new book is devoted to representing diverse and innovative ecocritical voices from throughout the world, particularly from developing nations. The two volumes complement each other by pointing out the need for further cultivation of the environmental humanities in regions of the world that are, essentially, the front line of the human struggle to invent sustainable and just civilizations on an imperiled planet.

Together, their work signals a new direction in the field and offers refreshingly original insights into a broad spectrum of texts.