Textus. English studies in Italy (2021). Vol. 34/3: Environmental humanities and english literary studies : facing the crisis of the immagination

This special issue Environmental Humanities and English Literary Studies: Facing the Crisis of the Imagination examines the state of the art of environmental and ecocritical approaches to English literary studies. The Environmental Humanities, subsuming ecocriticism, now offers themselves (at least in the anglosphere) as a broader cultural and academic paradigm aimed at interpreting, critiquing and transforming what Ghosh diagnoses as the "crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination" that concurs with the climate crisis. The Environmental Humanities encourage us to move beyond both the linguistic and cultural turns that have dominated the last half a century (while adapting their hermeneutic tools) to grapple with the affective materiality of the world, the agency of non-human species and new models of temporality. At the interface with postcolonial and critical race theory, the Environmental Humanities also invite us to explore the entanglements of the Anthropocene with the history of colonialism and imperialism, alongside forms of racial and social injustice that still structure global politics, especially the impact on migration. This issue, ranging from the early modern to the postmodern, includes an introduction by the editors Shaul Bassi and Emma Mason, and the following essays: Rocco Coronato: The Wild Field. Stormbraining the Complex Rhythms of King Lear Serena Baiesi: Mary Shelley and the Anthropocene: An Eco-feminist Reading of The Last Man Sarah Hughes Losing Eden: Ruskin and the Anthropocene in the Veneto and England Stefano Rozzoni The Georgians and the Environmental Imagination: Re-evaluating Georgian Poetry (1911-1912) through an Ecocritical Lens Paolo Bugliani Modern(ist) fables. Notes on Some Animals Inhabiting Early 20th-century Short Stories Carmen Gallo Not Not Not Not Not Enough: Caryl Churchill’s ecological drama and commitment Roberta Grandi “Animals don’t behave like men... They have dignity and animality.” Richard Adams’s Watership Down and interspecies relationships in the Anthropocene Carmen Concilio The Garden as Democratic Space: Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Richard Powers Giulia Champion ‘The River Has Been Put on Tap’: Decolonising Water and Historiography in V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979) and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2011)