Nicole C. Dittmer offers a reimagining of the popular Gothic female “monster” figure in early-to-mid-Victorian literature. Regardless of the extensive scholarship concerning monstrosities, these pre-fin-de-siècle figurations have often been neglected by critical studies or interpreted as fragments of mind and body which create a division between culture and nature. In Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism, Dittmer deploys monism to delineate from and contest such dualism, unifies the material-immaterial aspects of fictional women, and blurs the distinction between nature-culture. Blending intertextual disciplines of medical sciences, ecofeminism, and fiction, she exposes female monstrosities as material and semiotic figurations. This book, then, identifies how women in the Victorian Gothic are informed by the entanglement of both immaterial discourses and material conditions. When repressed by social customs, the monistic mind-body of the material-semiotic figure reacts to and disrupts processes of ontology, transforming women into “wild” and “monstrous” (re)presentations.

The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature explores the interplay between the domination of nature and the oppression of women, as well as liberatory alternatives, bringing together essays from leading academics in the field to facilitate cutting-edge critical readings of literature. Covering the main theoretical approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes: Examination of ecofeminism through the literatures of a diverse sampling of languages, including Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish; native speakers of Tamil, Vietnamese, Turkish, Slovene, and Icelandic Analysis of core issues and topics, offering innovative approaches to interpreting literature, including: activism, animal studies, cultural studies, disability, gender essentialism, hegemonic masculinity, intersectionality, material ecocriticism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, postmodernism, race, and sentimental ecology Surveys key periods and genres of ecofeminism and literary criticism, including chapters on Gothic, Romantic, and Victorian literatures, children and young adult literature, mystery, and detective fictions, including interconnected genres of climate fiction, science fiction, and fantasy, and distinctive perspectives provided by travel writing, autobiography, and poetry This collection explores how each of ecofeminism’s core concerns can foster a more emancipatory literary theory and criticism, now and in the future. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, gender studies, and the environmental humanities.

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.”