AustLit

'This article contemplates ecobiography, a little-researched form of life writing which depicts how human selves are supported and shaped by their environment. It details the author’s ecobiography of botanist Georgiana Molloy (1805–1843) and the plants she collected from the Southwest Australian Floristic Region, alongside an analysis of an Australian ecobiography, Kim Mahood’s Position Doubtful.' (Publication abstract)

'This article explores literary practices placing the writer in dialogue with the places he has inhabited recently while researching the Australian novel. This includes a fictocritical engagement with place-based Australian literature (via Xavier Herbert and Randolph Stow) and a maverick whizz through deconstruction and genre studies. Written in an elegiac mode punctuated by an environmental humanities countersignature, this example of period rhetoric embodies autobiography in the Anthropocene, the event horizon of human signature.' (Publication abstract)

'In this essay, the author argues that the appreciation of nonhuman poetic forms, or an “ethological poetics,” is a necessary but neglected mode of ecological relation, and is especially important in the Anthropocene. Motivated by his own creative practice—in particular, the composition of Lyre, a book of poems about different animals, plants, and landforms—he considers important examples of ethologically attentive poetics before outlining how his compositional method attempts to incorporate insights from the environmental humanities and animal studies. Rather than insisting on their essential difference from human worlds, the author argues for an attentive, ethical, and imaginative engagement with nonhuman lives, through which surprising and unusual forms of poetry might emerge.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay draws on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses” to test the capacity of memoir to bear witness to the Anthropocene. The essay focuses on three texts that feature memoirs of childhood on the wheat frontiers in Canada and Australia—Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow (1962), Barbara York Main’s Twice Trodden Ground (1971), and Dorothy Hewett’s Wild Card (1990). As an instrument of colonization and Indigenous dispossession, the impact of wheat was catastrophic, and these memoirs engage with the particular sites and circumstances that shape acts of remembering “wheaten childhoods.”' (Publication abstract)

'Using the fiction of Ceridwen Dovey and Eva Hornung, this essay considers animalography as a medium to represent animal emotions, particularly when ties of kinship break down. It addresses the difficulties and power dynamics associated with speaking for nonhuman others, while engaging with Cynthia Huff’s cautions regarding the posthumanist life narrative.' (Publication abstract)