With essays from 12 doctoral students, this volume showcases emergent voices and celebrates the current diversity of critical approaches in ecocriticism. Most of the essays examine environmental issues within traditional literary genres, but a few analyze forms of pop culture, such as television sitcoms and heavy metal music. In a useful introduction, Oppermann offers a survey of the global contexts of ecocriticism. The essays themselves appear in three sections. The first, 'New Ecocritical Trends,' proposes a set of theoretical approaches: deconstructive ecocriticism, 'postlocal ecocriticism,' 'affective ecocriticism,' and 'gothic ecocriticism.' The second section explores how ecocriticism has moved beyond a concern with nature: these essays discuss the relationships among environment, culture, identity, and power and examine concepts of the 'un-natural' and the marginalized, place, and displacement. The final section focuses on human and animal relations in contemporary literature. The volume features an impressively transnational group of young scholars . . . The collection offers an interesting set of provocations and offers a glimpse of how ecocriticism might evolve as an increasingly global field of study. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.

Choice Reviews

Gothic ecocriticism. Eco-eroticism. Postlocalism. Unnatural eco-poetics. New materialisms. Eco-aesthetics… Serpil Oppermann’s farsighted, courageous project is here to show what ecocritical scholarship stands for: not only eliciting new categories, but also enabling new visions and creativities. The international voices speaking from these pages are telling us that the future of ecocriticism is here and now.

Serenella Iovino, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Turin, Italy

A needed spur to a more globalized field, New International Voices in Ecocriticism presents a lucid argument for why the ecocritical future must be geographically and temporally capacious. Combining activism and environmental justice and a focus on materiality with ethical generosity, the essays collected in this book offer a compelling vision of ecocriticism as an interdisciplinary and transformative practice. Serpil Oppermann is to be commended for gathering so many fine, emergent voices in this indispensable forum, and for composing an introduction for the book that serves as a manifesto for work to come.

Jeffrey J. Cohen, George Washington University