Anglo‐Saxon Literary Landscapes: Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination. By HeideEstes. Environmental Humanities in Pre‐modern Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 2017. 208 pp. €85. ISBN 978 90 8964 944 7.

Literary scholars have traditionally understood landscapes, whether natural or manmade, as metaphors for humanity instead of concrete settings for people's actions. This book accepts the natural world as such by investigating how Anglo-Saxons interacted with and conceived of their lived environments. Examining Old English poems, such as Beowulf and Judith, as well as descriptions of natural events from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other documentary texts, Heide Estes shows that Anglo-Saxon ideologies which view nature as diametrically opposed to humans, and the natural world as designed for human use, have become deeply embedded in our cultural heritage, language, and more.

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Hunger in the Garden: Shortage and Environmental Aesthetics in Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist

PMLA ◽

10.1632/pmla.2019.134.3.491 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 134 (3) ◽

pp. 491-506

Author(s):

Austin Hetrick

Keyword(s):

South African ◽

Social Relations ◽

Environmental Politics ◽

Environmental Problems ◽

Environmental Humanities ◽

Environmental Aesthetics ◽

Global Environmental ◽

History Of ◽

Environmental Imagination ◽

Insight Into

This essay, a reading of Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist (1974), seeks to reconcile the promise of global environmental aesthetics with postcolonial theories of difference. While the Anthropocene is often framed as universal and unprecedented, Gordimer's ironic presentation of an earlier discourse—centered on resource limits and population bombs—demonstrates that certain themes have existed in the global environmental imagination for decades. Read alongside the history of South African conservation and Judith Butler's theory of precarity, he Conservationist develops an alternative green aesthetic, one that considers environmental problems to be produced by diverse and unequal social relations. Gordimer's dialectical response to apartheid-era conservation (an emphasis on utopianism and haunting) offers insight into South Africa's contemporary environmental politics and into ongoing debates in the environmental humanities about the value of the central analytic strategies of postcolonialism.

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