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Elemental Ecocriticism

Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire

By: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Editor), Lowell Duckert (Editor)

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Paperback | 15 December 2015

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For centuries it was believed that all matter was composed of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire in promiscuous combination, bound by love and pulled apart by strife. Elemental theory offered a mode of understanding materiality that did not center the cosmos around the human. Outgrown as a science, the elements are now what we build our houses against. Their renunciation has fostered only estrangement from the material world.

The essays collected in Elemental Ecocriticism show how elemental materiality precipitates new engagements with the ecological. Here the classical elements reveal the vitality of supposedly inert substances (mud, water, earth, air), chemical processes (fire), and natural phenomena, as well as the promise in the abandoned and the unreal (ether, phlogiston, spontaneous generation).

Decentering the human, this volume provides important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. Three response essays meditate on the connections of this collaborative project to the framing of modern-day ecological concerns. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential of a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.

Industry Reviews

"The mixture here is rich, exhilarat- ing, and while the processes of creating this collection were evidently equally so for the contributors, and while the result is illuminating and at times almost heady for the reader, it behoves us to bear in mind the toxic within such intoxication and seek a little grit amongst the mud."-Green Letters

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