AustLit

'Stuart Cooke and Peter Denney’s edited collection, Transcultural Ecocriticism: Global, Romantic and Decolonial Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2021) offers a series of case studies on how the practice and study of literature responds to global ecological crisis. The emphasis on the ‘decolonial’ dimension of transcultural ecocriticism places the book in the field of postcolonial ecocriticism. The opening section of the book, ‘Planetary Localities’ invokes the key dialectic of Ursula Heise’s influential Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008). The second section, ‘Beyond the Romantic Frontier’ encompasses scholarship on eighteenth and nineteenth century cultures and imaginaries. The theme of the third and final section of the book is ‘Decolonial Poetics’ and focuses on case studies from Australia and Latin America.' (Publication abstract)