Myra Wright takes ecocritical studies on an interdisciplinary turn toward the water with her new research monograph, The Poetics of Angling in Early Modern England. Identifying the lively presence of both literal and metaphorical images of sport fishing in all kinds of early modern writing, this book aims to instill deep sympathy between the art of angling and the art of writing, and for the centrality of fish in early modern conceptions of humanity.

How did gender figure in understandings of spatial realms, from the inner spaces of the body to the furthest reaches of the globe? How did women situate themselves in the early modern world, and how did they move through it, in both real and imaginary locations? How do new disciplinary and geographic connections shape the ways we think about the early modern world, and the role of women and men in it? These are the questions that guide this volume, which includes articles by a select group of scholars from many disciplines: Art History, Comparative Literature, English, German, History, Landscape Architecture, Music, and Women's Studies. Each essay reaches across fields, and several are written by interdisciplinary groups of authors. The essays also focus on many different places, including Rome, Amsterdam, London, and Paris, and on texts and images that crossed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, or that portrayed real and imagined people who did. Many essays investigate topics key to the ’spatial turn’ in various disciplines, such as borders and their permeability, actual and metaphorical spatial crossings, travel and displacement, and the built environment.

First published in 1653, The Compleat Angler is one of the most influential environmental texts ever written. Addressing a politically and religiously polarized nation devastated by warfare, disease, ecological degradation, and climate change, Izaak Walton’s famous fishing treatise stages a radical thought experiment: how might humanity’s enhanced relationship with the natural world generate a new kind of sustaining—and sustainable—social order beyond the traditional boundaries of the church, the state, and the biological family? Challenging the current scholarly consensus that reads Walton’s how-to manual as a conservative polemic camouflaged by fishlore, Marjorie Swann examines this richly complicated portrayal of the natural world through an ecocritical lens and explores other neglected aspects of Walton’s writings, including his depictions of social hierarchy, gender, and sexuality. In the process, Swann analyzes a host of noncanonical environmental texts and provides a groundbreaking reappraisal of Charles Cotton’s “Part II” of The Compleat Angler. This study extends the hydrological turn in early modern ecocriticism and demonstrates how, as a genre, angling manuals provide new insights into the environmental, cultural, social, and literary history of early modern England. Taking its place alongside landmark works of ecocriticism such as Green Shakespeare and Milton and Ecology, this fresh and timely reassessment of The Compleat Angler rightly ranks Izaak Walton among the most important environmental writers of the early modern era.

The Gestalts of Mind and Text bridges literary studies and cognitive psychology to provide a unique contribution to the field of Cognitive Literary Studies. The book presents an investigation of metaphor in poetic texts, adopting and developing empirical methods used by Gestalt Psychology, while integrating concepts informed by Gestalt Psychology. The title indicates an intellectual tradition, to be termed the Gestalt of the Mind, that begins with the Würzburg School of Psychology and its subsequent development into Gestalt Psychology, which provides a rich heritage for the field of Cognitive Literary Studies. The title further indicates an intellectual and creative tradition, to be termed the Gestalt of the Text, applied to various literary schools (Medieval, Early Modern, Modernist). Finally, the Gestalt-Interaction Theory of Metaphor delineates the potentialities for different types of readings of poetic metaphor. This book further makes three significant contributions: the first is the focus on the empirical investigation of metaphor in poetic texts; the second is the integration of the aspects of problem-solving, bidirectionality of metaphor, embodied cognition and the grotesque, in analyzing poetic texts and verbal protocols; and the third is the focus on various literary traditions, spanning languages and periods. The goal of this book is to present an interdisciplinary study of the Gestalts of Mind and Text. This will be of interest to a varied audience, including cognitive psychologists, literary scholars, researchers in aesthetics, scholars of metaphor and those with an interest in intellectual history.

Unpicking the ecopolitics of Shakespeare's plays at the Stuart court, Shakespeare Beyond the Green World establishes that the playwright was remarkably attentive to the environmental issues of his era. As a court dramatist, he designed his plays to captivate a patron deeply involved in both the conservation and exploitation of a burgeoning empire's natural resources. Spurred by James' campaign to unify his kingdoms, the Jacobean Shakespeare ventures beyond the green and pleasant lowlands of England to chart the wild topographies of an expansionist Great Britain: the blasted heath in Macbeth, the caves and mines of Timon of Athens, the overfished North Sea in Pericles, the Welsh mountains in Cymbeline, the Arctic fur country in The Winter's Tale, the fens in The Tempest, overcrowded London and empty Ulster in Measure for Measure and Coriolanus, and the night in Antony and Cleopatra and King Lear. While these plays often simulate a monarch's-eye-view of the natural world, t reveal that Crown policies were fiercely contested from below. In addition to trekking beyond verdant landscapes, Shakespeare Beyond the Green World seeks to mitigate the Anglocentric and anthropocentric bias of the archive by putting the plays into conversation with texts in which the subaltern wild growls back. Combining deep dives into environmental history with close readings of Shakespearean wordplay, original typography, and original performance conditions, this study re-wilds the Renaissance stage. It spotlights Shakespeare's tendency to humanize beasts and bestialize allegedly godlike monarchs, debunking fantasies of human exceptionalism. By clarifying how the Jacobean plays expose monarchical dominion as ecological tyranny, this study remains scrupulously historicist while reasserting Shakespearean drama's scorching relevance in the Anthropocene.

The landscape of Turkey, with its trees and animals inspires narratives of survival, struggle and escape. Animals, Plants, and Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature and Film, will be the first major study to offer fresh theoretical insight into this landscape, by offering a collection of analyses of key texts of Turkish literature and cinema. Through discussion of both classical and contemporary works, this volume, paves the way for the formation of a ecocritical canon in Turkish literature and the rise of certain themes that are unique to Turkish experience. Snakes, fishermen and fish who catch men, porcupines contemplating on human agency, dogs exiled on an island and men who put dogs to fights, goat herders and windy steppes of Anatolia are all agents in a territory that constantly shifts. The essays included in this volume demonstrate the ways in which the crystallized relations between human and non-human form, break, and transform.

While our physical surroundings fashion our identities, we, in turn, fashion the natural elements in which or with which we live. This complex interaction between the human and the non-human already resonated in Shakespeare's plays and poems. As details of the early modern supra- and infra-celestial landscape feature in his works, this dictionary brings to the fore Shakespeare's responsiveness to and acute perception of his 'environment' and it covers the most significant uses of words related to this concept. In doing so, it also examines the epistemological changes that were taking place at the turn of the 17th century in a society which increasingly tried to master nature and its elements. For this reason, the intersections between the natural and the supernatural receive special emphasis. All in all, this dictionary offers a wide variety of resources that takes stock of the 'green criticism' that recently emerged in Shakespeare studies and provides a clear and complete overview of the idea, imagery and language of environment in the canon.

Stages of Transmutation: Science Fiction, Biology, and Environmental Posthumanism develops the theoretical perspective of environmental posthumanism through analyses of acclaimed science fiction novels by Greg Bear, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Jeff VanderMeer, in which the human species suddenly transforms in response to new or changing environments. Narrating dramatic ecological events of human-to-nonhuman encounter, invasion, and transmutation, these novels allow the reader to understand the planet as an unstable stage for evolution and the human body as a home for bacteria and viruses. Idema argues that by drawing tension from biological theories of interaction and emergence (e.g. symbiogenesis, epigenetics), these works unsettle conventional relations among characters, technologies, story-worlds, and emplotment, refiguring the psychosocial work of the novel as always already biophysical. Problematizing a desire to compartmentalize and control life as the property of human subjects, these novels imagine life as an environmentally mediated, staged event that enlists human and nonhuman actors. Idema demonstrates how literary narratives of transmutation render biological lessons of environmental instability and ecological interdependence both meaningful and urgent—a vital task in a time of mass extinction, hyperpollution, and climate change. This volume is an important intervention for scholars of the environmental humanities, posthumanism, literature and science, and science and technology studies.

This encyclopaedic account of animals in Shakespeare's plays and poems, provides readers with a much-needed resource by which to navigate the recent outpouring of critical and historical work on the topic. This dictionary extends its coverage to include insects, fish and mythic creatures, as well as the places, practices and lore pertaining to all animal-oriented experiences of early modern life. It emphasizes the role of animality in defining character, and is attentive to the instabilities of the human-animal boundary as they were theatrically represented, exploited and interrogated, but it is also concerned with the material presence of animals on stage and in everyday life in Shakespeare's world. The volume is a new tool for instructors, but is also a resource for critics and scholars in the many disciplines engaged with animal studies, posthumanist theory, ecostudies and cultural studies.

Fools and clowns were widely popular characters employed in early modern drama, prose texts and poems mainly as laughter makers, or also as ludicrous metaphorical embodiments of human failures. Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law and Medicine, 1500–1640 pays full attention to the intellectual difference of fools, rather than just their performativity: what does their total, partial, or even pretended ‘irrationality’ entail in terms of non-standard psychology or behaviour, and others’ perception of them? Is it possible to offer a close contextualised examination of the meaning of folly in literature as a disability? And how did real people having intellectual disabilities in the Renaissance period influence the representation and subjectivity of literary fools? Alice Equestri answers these and other questions by investigating the wide range of significant connections between the characters and Renaissance legal and medical knowledge as presented in legal records, dictionaries, handbooks, and texts of medicine, natural philosophy, and physiognomy. Furthermore, by bringing early modern folly in closer dialogue with the burgeoning fields of disability studies and disability theory, this study considers multiple sides of the argument in the historical disability experience: intellectual disability as a variation in the person and as a difference which both society and the individual construct or respond to. Early modern literary fools’ characterisation then emerges as stemming from either a realistic or also from a symbolical or rhetorical representation of intellectual disability.