Words on Water

Maureen Devine, Christa Grewe-Volpp (Eds.)

Words on Water. Literary and Cultural Representations

ISBN 978-3-86821-049-1, 212 S., kt., € 22,50 (2008)

Words on Water presents a unique combination of international and interdisciplinary approaches to global and local water issues. The contributions attest to the productivity of ecocriticism's analyses of literary and cultural representations form a variety of perspectives, illuminating the enormous and multifaceted significance of water in literature, art, and film, as a daily commodity and as part of spiritualism, in the USA, in Canada and in Europe as well as in India and Australia. They demonstrate the imbrication of nature and culture, or, more specifically, how water as an autonomous, active force affects human culture, and how, on the other hand, cultural ideologies and processes try to tame, to instrumentalize and to define a natural element, albeit often with disastrous results. The contributions are an important step in highligthing the global significance of water, in appreciating its material quality and in revealing the consequences of its cultural appropriations.

Buchvorschau / Inhaltsverzeichnis (pdf)

Pressestimme

"The critical views presented in this book are a representative cross‐section of current ecocritical scholarship. According to the editors, ecocriticism encourages an ethically committed reading of texts and performs the task of 'policing' cultural reality, two strategies which raise awareness about our environmental crises and thus contribute to the development of a more responsible society. The ecocritical approaches pursued in this book have the great merit of drawing our attention to the world we live in, showing us that humans, just like water, are members of the same web called oikos, our house, and that, as in the Tamil poem, everything is related: 'We had lost our forests for rice, ‐ / and then, no rain; / Now, no forest, and no rice'."

Isabel Alves, Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 1.2 (2010)