Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts

Munroe, Jennifer; Geisweidt, Edward J.

doi:10.4324/9781315578668

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Bruckner and Brayton) appearing in 2008, a special issue of Shakespeare Studies in 2011 and a forthcoming Shakespeare Jahrbuch on “Shakespeare's Green Worlds” to arrive in 2017. Yet other authors are not ignored: Early Modern Ecostudies (Hallock, Kamps and Raber, ), The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (Feerick and Nardizzi, ), Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts (Munroe, Geisweidt and Bruckner, ) and the special issue of the Early Modern Studies Journal (vol. 3) all explore a wide range.…”

Section: Environmental Renaissance Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental Renaissance Studies

Jones

2017

Literature Compass

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Recent developments in renaissance and early modern ecocriticism, since surveys by Karen Raber and Sharon O'Dair, have made the field discursive. Some critics maintain that ecocriticism, ecostudies or environmental studies must be self‐consciously activist and presentist. Others practise a more historicist approach, which is only implicitly activist, if at all. This article considers the recent environmental criticism of renaissance literature and Shakespeare – in its place on the spectrum of presentism and historicism – and argues that the field's discursiveness is a positive development, which will lead to a growth of ecocritical work in the period. Recent relevant work in environmental history is introduced and a case made for a greater engagement with it in literary ecocriticism.

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Section: Environmental Renaissance Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental Renaissance Studies

Jones

2017

Literature Compass

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“…Sharon O'Dair has been one of the most central and vocal scholars in this debate, and her “Is It Ecocriticism If It Is Not Presentist?” approaches the question head on. So too does the forthcoming essay collection, Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Texts (Munroe, Geisweidt, and Bruckner, ed. ), which dedicates an entire section to it.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…An additional essay collection is forthcoming: Jennifer Munroe, Edward J. Geisweidt, and Lynne Bruckner, ed. Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Texts: A Field Guide for Reading and Teaching (. Ashgate, 2015).…”

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confidence: 99%

Shakespeare and Ecocriticism Reconsidered

Munroe

2015

Literature Compass

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Organized around a set of principles rather than a unified theoretical approach, ecocriticism considers the relationship between humans and nonhumans, especially as expressed in texts. Despite calls from some for ecocritics to rally around a unified theory, ecocritics have embraced the inclusivity that such broad definition has allowed. Thus, practitioners have come to ecocriticism with a range of interests. Such interests vary from an earlier focus on how the human/nonhuman relationship was fractured (and its recuperation in nature writing in particular) to a later emphasis on how it is always-already interconnected. Along the way, and especially in light of concerns about our current environmental crises, many ecocritics have cited a political dimension to the field, bringing concerns of the past and present together and examining intersections between such things as environmental degradation, misogyny, racism, homophobia, and speciesism. Early modern ecocriticism, especially in Shakespeare studies, has become a steadily growing field over the past decade. But early modern ecocritics' focus on the "nonhuman" tends to be more focused than that category might suggest, ranging from (nonhuman) animals, to plants, to minerals -challenging the distinction between animate and inanimate as well as asking us to rethink the integrity (let alone the exceptionalism) of the category of the human. This essay reviews the state of the field of Shakespeare and ecocriticism and offers a pathway for its future development, especially to suggest that it retains its political roots and focus on the implications of the material interactions between humans and nonhumans related to gender, race, and class.

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Lettuce Entertain You: Floral Agency in Ralph Knevet's <i>Rhodon and Iris</i>

Howard

2021

Performance Philosophy

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This essay investigates the performativity of plants in Ralph Knevet’s Rhodon and Iris, a play that was written and performed for a feast held by the Norwich Society of Florists in 1631. The play explores at least two forms of performativity: the first is the act of staging plants for a theatrical performance, where vegetables present their virtues through floral allegories that are enacted by human players. The second form is the way plants affect and are affected by their environments, particularly as theorized by Michael Marder and Mel Y. Chen. In Rhodon and Iris, these two dimensions work together to produce a form of floral agency that decenters the human. The essay explores how floral agency collaborates with literary narratives when beings perform for plants (within a history of floral celebrations), as plants (embodying plants as allegorical figures), and with plants (floral characters using plants as ingredients in cosmetics, poisons, and antidotes). Knevet uses literature to articulate a unique plant philosophy that challenges divisions between art and nature and among literature, philosophy, and science. Rhodon and Iris thus illustrates the many ways that theatrical performances and printed playbooks, and even printed herbals and herbaria, responded to and shaped the performativity of plants.

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Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Environmental Renaissance Studies

Environmental Renaissance Studies

Shakespeare and Ecocriticism Reconsidered

Lettuce Entertain You: Floral Agency in Ralph Knevet's <i>Rhodon and Iris</i>

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