1st Edition
The Ecopoetics of War
The Ecopoetics of War explores the interrelationality of human and non-human entities in the context of conflict as it is recorded in literature and culture. This collection of essaysdemonstrates the specific and fertile role of literature in representations of war, as it foregrounds the manifold ways in which the borders between human and non-human, including flora, fauna, and technology, become porous, thus questioning traditional onto-epistemological and ethical categories.
Bringing together British, American, and postcolonial studies, The Ecopoetics of War covers a variety of historical periods, geographical areas, and literary genres. Interdisciplinary in its outlook, it intertwines war studies, ecocriticism, literary theory, philosophy, and cultural studies. By analyzing the stylistic and discursive strategies devised by writers to translate the sensory experience of the battlefield, the contributors shed light on the unique capacity of literature to foreground the entanglement of human and nonhuman in the context of armed conflict, and thus unveil an “ecopoetics of war.”
This collection will interest scholars of literature, specialists of war studies and ecocriticism, and any reader interested in such issues as ecowar, ecocide, the Anthropocene, or environmental justice. It can inspire interdisciplinary teaching or research projects, especially in the current context of global environmental crisis.
Introduction
Sylvain Belluc, Isabelle Brasme, and Guillaume Tanguy
PART I
Distributive Agency, Shared Vulnerability, and Decomposition
1 Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War Stories and Essays: The Bitterness of a “Cynic” or the Insight of a Neo-Materialist?
Marie-Odile Salati
2 Between Safety and Conflict: War and Nature in a Few Poems of the First World War
Laure-Hélène Anthony-Gerroldt
3 Fantasized Muddy Landscapes: William Faulkner’s World War I
Frédérique Spill
PART II
Resilience, Recomposition, and Reconsideration
4 Plotting the Blitzscape: from Representation to Composition in Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness (1950)
Clémence Laburthe-Tolra
5 Knocking on Delville Wood: The Destruction of Natural Elements During World War I and The Construction of a South African Memory
Gilles Teulié
6 “A Prophetic Vision of the Past:” The Nature of War in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Biblique des Derniers Gestes (2002)
Carine Mardorossian
7 The Dissenting Ecology of War Writing: Capitalocene and Ecocide in the Iraq War Fiction of Phil Klay, Kevin Powers, and Roy Scranton
Julien Brugeron
PART III
Technopoetics
8 The Corpse in the Garden: War and Nature in American Literature, from Walt Whitman to James Ellroy
Benoît Tadié
9 Knights on Wheels: Chivalry and Horsepower in the American Ambulance Corps
Daniel Bowman
10 Submarine Optics in Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop
Rachel Murray
Biography
Sylvain Belluc is Senior Lecturer in British History and Literature at Nîmes University and Researcher at Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3 University.
Isabelle Brasme is Senior Lecturer in British Literature at Nîmes University, Researcher at Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3 University.
Guillaume Tanguy is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3 University.
