Environment / Religion & Literature

Reclaiming Romanticism

Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization

Kate Rigby, Monash University, Australia The earliest environmental criticism took its inspiration from the Romantic poets and their immersion in the natural world. Today the “romanticising” of nature has come to be viewed with suspicion. Written by one of the leading ecocritics writing today, this book rediscovers the importance of the European Romantic tradition to the ways that writers and critics engage with the environment in the Anthropocene era. Exploring the work of poets including Wordsworth, Shelley and Clare, it discovers a rich vein of Romantic eco-materialism and brings these writers into dialogue with contemporary American and Australian poets and artists.

UK November 2021 • US November 2021 • 256 pages PB 9781350243262 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781474290593 ePub 9781474290609 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781474290616 • £76.50 / $100.32 Series: Environmental Cultures • Bloomsbury Academic

Ecospectrality

Haunting and Environmental Justice in Contemporary Anglophone Novels

Laura A. White, Middle Tennessee State University, USA Analysing contemporary Anglophone novels from across the world – including Australia, Nigeria, South Africa, India and Jamaica – Ecospectrality explores how ghosts can help readers to perceive difficult to visualise environmental threats and access marginalised environmental knowledges. Drawing on the latest work in postcolonial ecocriticism, hauntology and environmental philosophy, this book shows that instead of prompting fear, these hauntings can foster understanding across species and generations to enable inclusive formulations of environmental justice.

UK November 2021 • US November 2021 • 224 pages PB 9781350243248 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781350091566 ePub 9781350091580 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350091573 • £76.50 / $100.32 Series: Environmental Cultures • Bloomsbury Academic

New Directions in Religion and Literature

Emma Mason, University of Warwick, UK, and Mark Knight, University of Toronto, Canada

Christian Heresy, James Joyce, and the Modernist Literary Imagination

Reinventing the Word

Gregory Erickson, The Gallatin School, USA Exploring heretical movements and texts from the Gnostic Gospels to The Book of Mormon, this book uses Joyce’s work, particularly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as a prism that offers multiple perspectives on how the history of Christian heresy remains a part of how we read, write, and think about bodies, books, language, time, and literature. Through the work of James Joyce, this book provides new ways of understanding modern literature and literary theory, showing how our modern and ‘secular’ reading practices reflect how we perceive our religious histories.

UK January 2022 • US December 2022 • 248 pages • 8 bw illus HB 9781350212756 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350212770 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350212763 • £76.50 / $100.32 Series: New Directions in Religion and Literature • Bloomsbury Academic

Religion and American Literature Since 1950

Mark Eaton, Azusa Pacific University, USA From Flannery O’Connor and James Baldwin to the post-9/11 writings of Jonathan Franzen and Don DeLillo, imaginative writers have often been the most insightful chroniclers of the USA’s changing religious life since the end of World War II. Exploring a wide range of writers from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and secular backgrounds, this book provides a fresh study of contemporary fiction’s engagement with religious faith, identity and practice. By reading the major writers of our time, it discovers a more nuanced picture of the varieties of American religious experience than commonplace cultural ideas of progressive secularisation or faith-based polarization might suggest.

UK October 2021 • US October 2021 • 288 pages PB 9781350243217 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781350123755 ePub 9781350123779 • £72.00 / $95.11 ePdf 9781350123762 • £72.00 / $95.11 Series: New Directions in Religion and Literature • Bloomsbury Academic