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Book Cover for: Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture: Biology and the Bildungsroman. Helena Feder, Helena Feder

Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture: Biology and the Bildungsroman. Helena Feder

Helena Feder

Arguing that the Bildungsroman is humanist culture's own origin story, Feder draws on the work of biologists in her examination of works by Voltaire, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf and Jamaica Kincaid. She dramatizes Western culture's own awareness of the instability of the binary of nature and culture, making a timely intervention in the ongoing culture-nature debate, bridging the gap between cultural theory and biologically grounded research.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Routledge
  • Publish Date: Mar 26th, 2014
  • Pages: 192
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.21in - 6.14in - 0.50in - 0.99lb
  • EAN: 9781409401575
  • Categories: Comparative Literature

About the Author

Helena Feder is Associate Professor of Literature and Environment at East Carolina University. She has published articles on various subjects in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Green Letters, Women's Studies, and the Journal of Ecocriticism.

Praise for this book

'Professor Feder makes a fresh, distinctive, consistently illuminating contribution to ecocriticism by reading a strikingly variegated array of borderline examples of Bildungsroman from the 1700s to the present against the grain of that genre's implicit claim to tell stories of uniquely human origin and growth.' Lawrence Buell, Harvard University, USA ' ... an important call to expand political relevance to include the nonhuman (especially other animals) in meaningful recognition of the deep, interconnecting continuity of life. By demonstrating the Bildungsroman's failure to maintain the illusion of human cultural superiority, Feder's book contests the humanist ideology of culture and makes room for a multispecies multiculturalism.' Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 'Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture ... is certainly [a text] that all those interested in the interlocking areas of ecocriticism, the narrative form and feminism will find rewarding, provocative and challenging in equal measure.' Green Letters