Ecocritical Approaches to
Italian Culture and Literature
Ecocritical Theory and Practice
Series Editor: Douglas A. Vakoch, California Institute of Integral Studies, USA
Advisory Board:
Joni Adamson, Arizona State University, USA; Mageb Al-adwani, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia; Bruce Allen, Seisen University, Japan; Hannes Bergthaller, National Chung-Hsing University, Taiwan; Zlia Bora, Federal University of Paraba, Brazil; Izabel Brando, Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas, USA; Jeffrey J. Cohen, George Washington University, USA; Simo Farias Almeida, Federal University of Roraima, Brazil; Julia Fiedorczuk, University of Warsaw, Poland; Camilo Gomides, University of Puerto RicoRio Piedras, Puerto Rico; Yves-Charles Grandjeat, Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux 3 University, France; George Handley, Brigham Young University, USA; Isabel Hoving, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Idom Thomas Inyabri, University of Calabar, Nigeria; Serenella Iovino, University of Turin, Italy; Adrian Ivakhiv, University of Vermont, USA; Daniela Kato, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, China; Petr Kopeck, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Mohammad Nasser Modoodi, Payame Noor University, Iran; Patrick Murphy, University of Central Florida, USA; Serpil Oppermann, Hacettepe University, Turkey; Rebecca Raglon, University of British Columbia, Canada; Anuradha Ramanujan, National University of Singapore, Singapore; Christian Schmitt-Kilb, University of Rostock, Germany; Marian Scholtmeijer, University of Northern British Columbia, Canada; Heike Schwarz, University of Augsburg, Germany; Murali Sivaramakrishnan, Pondicherry University, India; Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA; J. Etienne Terblanche, North-West University, South Africa; Julia Tofantuk, Tallinn University, Estonia; Jennifer Wawrzinek, Free University of Berlin, Germany; Cheng Xiangzhan, Shandong University, China; Yuki Masami, Kanazawa University, Japan; Hubert Zapf, University of Augsburg, Germany
Ecocritical Theory and Practice highlights innovative scholarship at the interface of literary/cultural studies and the environment, seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and environmental activists.
Titles in the Series
Ecocritical Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature: The Denatured Wild, edited by Pasquale Verdicchio
Coexistentialism and the Unbearable Intimacy of Ecological Emergency, by Sam Mickey
Disability and the Environment in American Literature: Toward an Ecosomatic Paradigm, edited by Matthew J. C. Cella
The Mythology of the Animal Farm in Childrens Literature: Over the Fence, by Stacy E. Hoult-Saros
Ecocritical Approaches to
Italian Culture and Literature
The Denatured Wild
Edited by Pasquale Verdicchio
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The editor of this volume, Pasquale Verdicchio, acknowledges the research grant support by the University of California that helped bring this work to fruition, and further support by the Office of the Dean of the Arts and Humanities Division, Cristina Della Coletta, toward the final production of the book.
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Introduction
Pasquale Verdicchio
The Denatured Wild: Ecocritical Approaches to
Italian Culture and Literature
As Cheryll Glotfelty notes in her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996), while many scholars had previously recognized the value of the interconnections between nature and culture they nevertheless remained rather isolated within their disciplines. Glotfelty points to the establishment of the ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) in 1992 as a landmark recognition of this emerging field of study. Although the influence of place on the imagination has always formed an important aspect of literary and cultural studies, an ecocritical approach contributes by bringing to the discussion the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas posed by the environmental crisis and, with that, an expansion of the notion of the world to include the entire ecosphere.
Departments and sections of foreign literatures and cultures in North America have perhaps been even more isolated in this regard. Until recently, their primary role has been to represent well-defined national literary and cultural traditions and less so the intricacies and contradictions inherent in the very concept of nation. This has certainly been the case for Italian Studies, a field that has only relatively of late come to include in its offerings and approaches a wider and more diverse range of subjects and issues. Queer studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, migration studies and, as in the case of this present collection, environmental concerns and ecocritical approaches to the cultures and peculiarities of the Italic peninsula, are indeed rather recent additions to the spectrum of research and curricula in Italian Studies.
Truly in the spirit of an environmental perspective, this volume seeks to offer a project that is not only representative of an emerging interest within the discipline, but one that suggests contact points or bridges that link Italian culture and environmentalism to more expansive spheres of influence and interactivity, particularly in light of the diverse locations outside of Italy from which its contributors write.
A Matter of Context
Although marking an important first attempt at defining a path, the publication of Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology (2003), edited by Patrick Barron and Anna Re, revealed a major gap in the very manner in which Italian environmental writing had been conceived up to that point. Without doubt useful in its gathering of selected works of Italian literature that reference nature, the volume nevertheless shows a slight lack of coherence regarding what one might call an environmental or ecocritical discourse. Aside from a couple of writers in the final section of that anthology, most of the collection is simply a compendium of writers across the ages whose work has included references to nature or for whom the latter provided inspiration. The absence of an activist environmentalist voice, an eco-consciousness that goes beyond an anthropocentric view of the world and what Glotfelty might call consciousness raising, both in practical and theoretical terms, of writers such as Rachel Carson, Gary Snyder, Terry Tempest Williams, Wendell Berry, Linda Hogan, or Barry Lopez, is much too evident.