The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704-1894 - (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultu) (Paperback)

About the Book

Advances our understanding of the literary legacy of contemporary ecological crises to investigate the interfaces of humanity and nature

Book Synopsis

At this critical juncture in which the biodiversity of planet Earth appears to be shrinking fast and furiously, Louis Kirk McAuley invites us to consider the ways in which particular unruly natures, including animals, plants and minerals, actively intervene in literature to decentre the human. Drawing upon invasion biology, McAuley offers transformative ecocritical interpretations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature and highlights the heterarchical nature of empire building. This includes analyses of texts composed by (or about) persons residing at, or just outside, the edges of the British and American Empires, including St Kitts and Nevis, Haiti, Cuba, Hawaii and Samoa, which were built around the global transfer of animals and plants. Offering biotic readings of this literature, McAuley highlights the human place in nature and provides practical literary examples of the ways oceans facilitate the confusion of time and place.

Review Quotes

A remarkable book. This fantastically eloquent and erudite study of empire writing offers an unrivalled account of the cultural registration of 'unruly natures' and their simultaneous contribution to, and troubling of, the imperial expansion of Britain and the US. McAuley's work represents a signal intervention into the Environmental Humanities.

--Michael Niblett, University of Warwick