Volkmann (EFL teaching, Friedrich Schiller U., Jena, Germany) et al. bring together 24 essays that examine nature and the environment in literary texts and how they contribute to a sense of
global responsibility. Essays range in topic from literature as a living organism to nature as a category like race, class, and gender. They include discussion of ecocriticism and News from
Nowhere, Herland, and Men Like Gods; novels and films that feature nature, or have an ecocritical or dystopian theme, such as The Hungry Tide, The Hunter, Shallows, and River Thieves; nature as
a cultural construct; notions of place; Western dualisms like human versus animal and man versus nature in books such as The Whale Caller, Foe, and Heart of Darkness; and representations of
ecological disasters in novels and films like Frankenstein, Oryx and Crake, The Day After Tomorrow, and Videodrome. Papers are revised from presentations given at the nineteenth annual
conference of the German Society for the Study of New English Literatures, held in Jena, Germany, in May 2007. Contributors work in literature, languages, and cultural studies around the world.
Annotation 穢2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
