This lively collection of essays explores the vital role of beauty in the human experience of place, interactions with other species, and contemplation of our own embodied lives. Devoting attention to themes such as global climate change, animal subjectivity, environmental justice and activism, and human moral responsibility for the environment, these contributions demonstrate that beauty is not only a meaningful dimension of our experience, but also a powerful strategy for inspiring cultural transformation. Taken as a whole, they underscore the ongoing relevance of aesthetics to the ecocritical project and the concern for beauty that motivates effective social and political engagement.
Table of Content
Acknowledgements
Introduction / Peter Quigley
I. The Relevance of Beauty
1. ‘It is out of fashion to say so’: The Language of Nature and the Rhetoric of Beauty in Robinson Jeffers / Tim Hunt
2. Thoreau’s Poetics of Nature / Arnold Berleant
3. The Pout’s Nest and the Painter’s Eye / Frank Stewart
4. ‘Yet How Beautiful It Is!’: Work, Ethics, and Beauty in Stegner’s Angle of Repose / Tyler Nickl
5. Renaissance Aesthetics, Picturesque Beauty, the Natural Landscape: An Essay Examining the Rise and Fall of the Impulse toward Beauty / Mark Luccarelli
II. Beauty and Engagement
6. Toward an Ecofeminist Aesthetic of Reconnection / Greta Gaard
7. Beauty and the Body: Towards an Ecofeminist Aesthetic that Includes Loving Our Naked Selves / Janine De Baise
8. Dystopia and Utopia in a Nuclear Landscape: Emerging Aesthetics in Satoyama / Yuki Masami
9. Know Beauty, Know Justice: Why Beauty Matters in the Classroom / Shaun Anne Tangney
III. Materiality, Transcendence, and Aesthetics
10. Nature’s Colors: A Prismatic Materiality in the Natural/Cultural Realms / Serpil Oppermann
11. From the Human to the Divine: Nature in the Writings of the Tamil Poet-Saints / Cynthia J. Miller
12. Beauty as Ideological and Material Transcendence / Werner Bigell
13. Toward Sustainable Aesthetics: The Poetry of Food, Sex, Water, Architecture, and Bicycle-Riding / Scott Slovic
Index
About the author
Peter Quigley is professor of English at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, and also Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs for the University of Hawai’i System. His publications include the edited volume Coyote in the Maze: Tracking Edward Abbey in a World of Words and Housing the Environmental Imagination: Politics, Beauty, and Refuge in American Nature Writing.Scott Slovic is professor of literature and environment, professor of natural resources and society, and Chair of the English Department at the University of Idaho. He is author and editor of many books and articles, including Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing and Going Away to Think.
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