French Ecocriticism
From the Early Modern Period to the Twenty-First Century
Series:
Edited By Daniel A. Finch-Race and Stephanie Posthumus
This book expounds fruitful ways of analysing matters of ecology, environments, nature, and the non-human world in a broad spectrum of material in French. Scholars from Canada, France, Great Britain, Spain, and the United States examine the work of writers and thinkers including Michel de Montaigne, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Arthur Rimbaud, Marguerite Yourcenar, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Serres, Michel Houellebecq, and Éric Chevillard. The diverse approaches in the volume signal a common desire to bring together form and content, politics and aesthetics, theory and practice, under the aegis of the environmental humanities.
Contents
Contents
Daniel A. Finch-Race and Stephanie Posthumus
Introduction: Developing French Ecocriticism
Part I Early Modern Economies and Ecologies
Through a Glass Darkly: Dominion and the French Wars of Religion
The Vanity of Ecology: Expenditure in Montaigne’s Vision of the New World
Part II Romanticism and Nature; Naturalism and Animality
Victor Hugo and the Politics of Ecopoetics
Fauves in the Faubourg: Animal Aesthetics in Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin
Part III Nineteenth-Century Ecopoetics
Ecopoetic Adventures in Rimbaud’s ‘Sensation’ and ‘Ma Bohème’
Towards an Ecopoetics of French Free Verse: Marie Krysinska’s Rythmes pittoresques
Part IV Twentieth-Century Ecological Thought
Michel Serres: From Restricted to General Ecology
Part V Millennial Bodies, Origins and Becoming-Milieu
Ecoerotica in Stéphane Audeguy’s La Théorie des nuages
Part VI Twenty-First-Century Natural Limits
Part VII Horizons and Prospects
Engaging with Cultural Differences: The Strange Case of French écocritique