Simon C. Estok - Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination

Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination

Ranging from colonial Mughal and Japanese imperial landscapes to the paradoxes of place in Victorian limericks, this volume exemplifies a broadening of interest in interdisciplinary studies of space and place within ecocriticism. Chapters explore landscapes of racism as well as utopian Chinese hermitages in greater Beat America, problematic meta-utopian spaces in writings in Asian and the West, indigenous writing by Pacific Islanders, as well as ancient Egyptian garden spaces.

Dean A. Brink, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan

This is a must read book.

Shiuhhuah Serena Chou, Institute of European and American Studies at Academia Sinica, Taiwan

This book offers a diverse and fascinating collection of essays about real and imagined landscapes, seascapes, and aerial spaces. The critical thread that ties the contributions together, ecocriticism, makes the book essential reading for almost any student and scholar, for there are few if any subjects studied and taught today that do not come up against questions about the environment. The book also reaches out to a global reader, for the contributors write about landscapes, seascapes, and aerial spaces from very different cultural, geographical, and disciplinary positions and sites in the world.

Iris Ralph, English at Tamkang University, Taiwan

Written from within the best traditions of ecocritical thought, this book provides a wide-ranging account of the spatial imagination of landscape and seascape in literary and cultural contexts from many regions of the world. It brings together essays by authors writing from diverse cultural traditions, across historical periods from ancient Egypt to the postcolonial and postmodern present, and touches on an array of divergent theoretical interventions. The volume investigates how our spatial imaginations become wired, looking at questions about mediation and exploring how various traditions compete for prominence in our spatial imagination. In what ways is personal experience inflected by prevailing cultural traditions of representation and interpretation? Can an individual maintain a unique and distinctive spatial imagination in the face of dominant trends in perception and interpretation? What are the environmental implications of how we see landscape? The book reviews how landscape is at once conceptual and perceptual, illuminating several important themes including the temporality of space, the mediations of place that form the response of an observer of a landscape, and the development of response in any single life from early, partial thoughts to more considered ideas in maturity. Chapters provide suggestive and culturally nuanced propositions from varying points of view on ancient and modern landscapes and seascapes and on how individuals or societies have arranged, conceptualized, or imagined circumambient space. Opening up issues of landscape, seascape, and spatiality, this volume commences a wide-ranging critical discussion that includes various approaches to literature, history, and cultural studies. Bringing together research from diverse areas such as ecocriticism, landscape theory, colonial and postcolonial theory, hybridization theory, and East Asian Studies to provide a historicized and global account of our ecospatial imaginations, this book will be useful for scholars of landscape ecology, ecocriticism, physical and social geography, postcolonialism and postcolonial ecologies, comparative literary studies, and East Asian Studies.

Simon C. Estok is Professor and Senior Research Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea. He is the Oriental Scholar () in the Department of Comparative and World Literature at Shanghai Normal University (20152018).

I-Chun Wang is Professor of English at the Center for Languages and Culture at Kaohsiung Medical University, Taiwan.

Jonathan White is Professor Emeritus in Literature at the University of Essex, UK.

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

39 National Poetry, Empires and War
David Aberbach

40 Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture
Technogothics
Edited by Justin D. Edwards

41 Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities
Postcolonial Approaches
Edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan

42 Theoretical Schools and Circles in the Twentieth-Century Humanities
Literary Theory, History, Philosophy
Edited by Marina Grishakova and Silvi Salupere

43 Gender, Race, and American Science Fiction
Reflections on Fantastic Identities
Jason Haslam

44 Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature
The Architectural Void
Patricia Garca

45 New Directions in 21st-Century Gothic
The Gothic Compass
Edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien

46 Latin American and Iberian Perspectives on Literature and Medicine
Edited by Patricia Novillo-Corvaln

47 Institutions of World Literature
Writing, Translation, Markets
Edited by Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen

48 Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media
Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds
Edited by Mari Hatavara, Matti Hyvrinen, Maria Mkel, and Frans Myr

49 Women Writers and the Occult in Literature and Culture
Female Lucifers, Priestesses, and Witches
Miriam Wallraven

50 Technology, Literature, and Digital Culture in Latin America
Mediatized Sensibilities in a Globalized Era
Edited by Matthew Bush and Tania Gentic

51 Race and Popular Fantasy Literature
Habits of Whiteness
Helen Young

52 Subjectivity and the Reproduction of Imperial Power
Empires Individuals
Daniel F. Silva

53 Ireland and Ecocriticism
Literature, History and Environmental Justice
Ein Flannery

54 Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture
Modern and Contemporary Perspectives
Edited by Jeffrey Clapp and Emily Ridge

55 New Perspectives on Detective Fiction
Mystery Magnified
Edited by Casey A. Cothran and Mercy Cannon

56 Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture
Alexandra Schultheis Moore

57 Globalizing Literary Genres
Literature, History, Modernity
Edited by Jernej Habjan and Fabienne Imlinger

58 War Gothic in Literature and Culture
Edited by Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Steffen Hantke

59 Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature
Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman
Heike Hartung

60 Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture
The Americas
Edited by Justin D Edwards and Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos

61 The Contemporaneity of Modernism
Literature, Media, Culture
Edited by Michael DArcy and Mathias Nilges

62 The Comic Imagination in Modern African Literature and Cinema
A Poetics of Laughter
Maik Nwosu

63 Transnational Narratives from the Caribbean
Diasporic Literature and the Human Experience
Elvira Pulitano