Avenging Nature comprises an exceptionally insightful collection of top-quality analyses of the portrayal of “insubordinate nature” in a carefully selected corpus of literature, art, and film from Europe and North America. Working from multiple theoretical focuses, contributors to this important volume reassess how cultural producers articulate nature’s "striking back" and vengeance against longstanding anthropocentrism. This book is a major international contribution to ecocritical scholarship.

Shelley Godsland, University of Amsterdam

This topical and timely exploration of the fraught relationship between humanity and nature along three major axes—ecocritical ethics, empowering nature and dystopias—comprises sixteen finely honed contributions by an international array of scholars. Focusing predominantly on contemporary Anglophone literature, the individually-authored chapters analyse how cultural texts have engaged in various yet interrelated ways with the aforementioned relationship through approaches that scholars and students hitherto unfamiliar with the topic or with its literary and cultural inscriptions will find compelling.

Glyn Hambrook, University of Wolverhampton

Nature is certainly avenged through this book, Avenging Nature. The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature bears witness to the wealth of creative global responses to an endangered nature in the Anthropocene. Its chapters distill the ecological wisdom of literature, art, and cinema from the early twentieth-century production of Spanish symbolist poet and painter Santiago Rusiñol to the groundbreaking genetic writing of Christian Bök in The Xenotext. It highlights the disturbing message of dystopian narratives such as Jeff Vandermeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy or Zal Batmanglij’s The East while reflecting anew on some classics of nature writing such as Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. This book deserves the attention of those seeking to understand how ecocritical thinking applied to manifold artistic expressions serves to unearth the voice of nature to make it heard loud and clear.

Diana Villanueva Romero, Universidad de Extremadura