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Ecologies of the Senses in Contemporary Literature

Navigating Animate Worlds

Ecologies of the Senses in Contemporary Literature cover

Ecologies of the Senses in Contemporary Literature

Navigating Animate Worlds

Description

Foregrounding the role of the senses in human experience and imagination, this book expands our understanding of the relationship between human and nonhuman worlds.

It argues for an examination of regions considered animal, even vegetal, that hide within the human as a powerful means to think of the human as an extension of natural ecology. In light of an increasing awareness of nonhuman intelligences, this book explores new imaginaries by reconfiguring the human sensorium as a site of ecological entanglements. It draws on ecocritical, indigenous, and new materialist philosophies and turns to a diverse range of literary works by writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison, and Michael Ondaatje in ways that reveal embodied sensory knowledge as a form of attunement to a dynamic environment that includes organisms and patterns of energy flow within a biospherical web of relations. Conceiving of perception as an ecological, embodied phenomenon, it proposes an approach that radically rethinks dualisms between nature and culture, matter and mind, and the human and nonhuman.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Through the Prism of the Senses
1. Visions of Sound
2. An Expanse of Tastes and Smells
3. Skin to Skin
4. Sensing Across Scales
5. Vegetal Affinities
6. Multispecies Entanglements
7. Sharing Breath
Epilogue: Towards a Multispecies Ethics
Bibliography
Index

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 26 Nov 2026
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Pages 240
ISBN 9781350571846
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Series Environmental Cultures
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Mirja Lobnik

Mirja Lobnik teaches in the Department of English…

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