Ecocriticism and the Island: Readings from the British-Irish Archipelago

Review Ecocriticism and the Island is a fascinating study of the diversity and importance of literature and life across the north Atlantic archipelago. Written with clarity and insight, it is a guide to the histories of communities around Ireland and Britain and an augur of our collective future through engagement with art, language, and climate science, all brought together in a compelling critical and creative narrative. It is an important addition to the archipelagic and blue humanities and marks a good step forward in island thinking. -- Nicholas Allen, director, Wilson Center for Humanities and Arts, University of GeorgiaDrawing upon an impressive breadth of theoretical reference as well as interviews with key writers, Pippa Marland offers sensitive and illuminating close readings of a diverse range of creative non-fictional texts. The result is a brilliantly original and engagingly lucid work of ‘archipelagraphy’ that demonstrates how ecocriticism might contribute to island studies and how island-themed texts might advance ecocritical practice. Ecocriticism and the Island is essential reading for all researchers and students interested in the intersections of literature, place, and contemporary environmental thought. -- David Cooper, founding co-director of the Centre for Place Writing, Manchester Metropolitan UniversityRead this book if you are drawn to the ever-more-crowded bookstore shelves of creative nonfiction about place and about living in, traversing, or mapping distinctive geographies and their communities. Ecocriticism and the Island is a meticulously researched study of island-themed books by some of the most important writers on these shelves. It is a gift to researchers seeking new approaches to island literary studies, offering thorough and utterly persuasive close readings that confirm the ultimate inseparability of actual and imagined islands. It is also a gift to researchers seeking a route between the concepts and methods of island studies and of ecocriticism, two approaches that, as Pippa Marland amply demonstrates, need each other. -- Lisa Fletcher, University of Tasmania Product Description Islands have long been the subject of cultural fascination, but in recent decades, they have exerted an increasingly powerful centrifugal force, sending writers to the outer edges of the British-Irish archipelago in search of inspiration and insight. Drawing on contemporary ecocritical approaches, island studies, and emergent archipelagic perspectives, Ecocriticism and the Island explores a wide selection of island-themed creative non-fiction. Through a combination of textual analysis, and, where possible, original interviews and archival research, Pippa Marland offers new insights into the work of Tim Robinson, Brenda Chamberlain, Christine Evans, W.G. Sebald, Stephen Watts, Amy Liptrot, Kathleen Jamie, Adam Nicolson, Robert Macfarlane, and David Gange. In assessing the ways in which these authors negotiate existing cultural tropes of the island while offering their own distinctive articulations of “islandness,” this book represents an important intervention into island literary studies. At the same time, it contributes to the development of an archipelagic strand of ecocriticism—one that offers a valuable perspective on human-environmental relationships in an Anthropocene context. About the Author Pippa Marland is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow based in the Department of English and Centre for Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol, UK.