Acclaimed poet and MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Lucia Perillo, a former park ranger who loved to hike the Cascade Mountains alone and prided herself on daring solo skis down the wild slopes of Mount Rainier, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when she was in her thirties. I've Heard the Vultures Singing is a clear-eyed and brazenly outspoken examination of her life as a person with disabilities. In unwavering and witty prose, and without a trace of self-pity, she contemplates the bitter ironies of being unable to walk, what it’s like to experience eros as a sick person, how to lower one’s expectations for a wilderness experience, and how to deal with the vagaries of a disease that has no predictable trajectory. Masterfully written, the essays resonate with lovers of literature and nature, and with anyone who has dealt with disadvantages of the body or the hard-luck limitations of ordinary life.

Nature and Literary Studies supplies a broad and accessible overview of one of the most important and contested keywords in modern literary studies. Drawing together the work of leading scholars of a variety of critical approaches, historical periods, and cultural traditions, the book examines nature's philosophical, theological, and scientific origins in literature, as well as how literary representations of this concept evolved in response to colonialism, industrialization, and new forms of scientific knowledge. Surveying nature's diverse applications in twenty-first-century literary studies and critical theory, the volume seeks to reconcile nature's ideological baggage with its fundamental role in fostering appreciation of nonhuman being and agency. Including chapters on wilderness, pastoral, gender studies, critical race theory, and digital literature, the book is a key resource for students and professors seeking to understand nature's role in the environmental humanities.

From the sculptured peaks of Mount Rushmore to the Coloradan prairie lands at Sand Creek to the idyllic islands of the Pacific, the West’s signature environments add a new dimension to the study of memorials. In such diverse and often dramatic landscapes, how do the natural and built environments shape our emotions? In Memorials Matter, author Jennifer Ladino investigates the natural and physical environments of seven diverse National Park Service (NPS) sites in the American West and how they influence emotions about historical conflict and national identity. Chapters center around the region’s diverse inhabitants (Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, African, and Native Americans) and the variously traumatic histories these groups endured—histories of oppression, exploitation, incarceration, slavery, and genocide. Drawing on material ecocritical theory, Ladino emphasizes the ideological and political importance of memorials and how they evoke visceral responses that are not always explicitly “storied,” but nevertheless matter in powerful ways. In this unique blend of narrative scholarship and critical theory, Ladino demonstrates how these memorial sites and their surrounding landscapes, combined with written texts, generate emotion and shape our collective memory of traumatic events. She urges us to consider our everyday environments and to become attuned to features and feelings we might have otherwise overlooked.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability brings together some of the most influential and important contemporary perspectives in this growing field. The book traces the history of the field and locates literary disability studies in the wider context of activism and theory. It introduces debates about definitions of disability and explores intersectional approaches in which disability is understood in relation to gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality and ethnicity. Divided broadly into sections according to literary genre, this is an important resource for those interested in exploring and deepening their knowledge of the field of literature and disability studies.

Bringing together original contributions from scholars across the world, this volume traces the history of travel writing from antiquity to the Internet age. It examines travel texts of several national or linguistic traditions, introducing readers to the global contexts of the genre. From wilderness to the urban, from Nigeria to the polar regions, from mountains to rivers and the desert, this book explores some of the key places and physical features represented in travel writing. Chapters also consider the employment in travel writing of the diary, the letter, visual images, maps and poetry, as well as the relationship of travel writing to fiction, science, translation and tourism. Gender-based and ecocritical approaches are among those surveyed. Together, the thirty-seven chapters here underline the richness and complexity of this genre.

Hurt and Pain: Literature and the Suffering Body examines the strategies authors have used to portray bodies in pain, drawing on a diverse range of literary texts from the seventeenth century to the present day. Susannah B. Mintz provides readings of canonical writers including John Donne, Emily Dickinson, and Samuel Beckett, alongside contemporary writers such as Ana Castillo and Margaret Edson, focusing on how pain is shaped according to the conventions-and also experiments-of genre: poetry, memoir, drama, and fiction. With insights from disability theory and recent studies of the language of pain, Mintz delivers an important corrective to our most basic fears of physical suffering, revealing through literature that pain can be a source of connection, compassion, artistry, and knowledge. Not only an important investigation of authors' formal and rhetorical choices, Hurt and Pain reveals how capturing pain in literature can become a fundamental component of crafting human experience.

Sexy Like Us: Disability, Humor, and Sexuality takes a humorous, intimate approach to disability through the stories, jokes, performances, and other creative expressions of people with disabilities. Author Teresa Milbrodt explores why individuals can laugh at their leglessness, find stoma bags sexual, discover intimacy in scars, and flaunt their fragility in ways both hilarious and serious. Their creative and comic acts crash, collide, and collaborate with perceptions of disability in literature and dominant culture, allowing people with disabilities to shape political disability identity and disability pride, call attention to social inequalities, and poke back at ableist cultural norms. This book also discusses how the ambivalent nature of comedy has led to debates within disability communities about when it is acceptable to joke, who has permission to joke, and which jokes should be used inside and outside a community’s inner circle. Joking may be difficult when considering aspects of disability that involve physical or emotional pain and struggles to adapt to new forms of embodiment. At the same time, people with disabilities can use humor to expand the definitions of disability and sexuality. They can help others with disabilities assert themselves as sexy and sexual. And they can question social norms and stigmas around bodies in ways that open up journeys of being, not just for individuals who consider themselves disabled, but for all people.