The narrative arc that dominates most stories about the environment today is not difficult to discern, particularly when it comes to the issues central to the two books I discuss here: the ocean and mass extinction. From garbage patches to bleached coral, beached whales, and acidification, from bees to polar bears, the news is uniformly bad. Environmentalist stories tend toward the melancholy arc of decline, drawing, as Ursula K. Heise notes, on tragedy and elegy. Both Heise’s Imagining Extinction and Teresa Shewry’s Hope at Sea affirm the descriptive power of such narratives, for the realities they describe are themselves dire. Nonetheless, both books examine texts that begin to imagine beyond the standard templates, exploring utopian thinking and hope, branching into comedy and the epic, and asking, as Heise provocatively puts it, “whether and how it might be possible to move environmentalism beyond the stereotypical narrative of the decline of nature...
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Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species
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December 1, 2018
Issue Editors
Book Review|
December 01 2018
Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species
Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature
Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species
. By Heise, Ursula K.. Chicago
: Univ. of Chicago Press
. 2016
. xiii, 280 pp. Cloth, $82.50; paper $27.50; e-book available.Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature
. By Shewry, Teresa. Minneapolis
: Univ. of Minnesota Press
. 2015
. 272
pp. Cloth, $87.50; paper, $25.00; e-book available.
Molly Wallace
Molly Wallace
Molly Wallace is associate professor of English, cross-appointed in the School of Environmental Studies, at Queen’s University in Canada. Her recent books include Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2016) and, coedited with David Carruthers, Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives in an Age of Crisis (Routledge, 2017).
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American Literature (2018) 90 (4): 876–878.
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Molly Wallace; Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species
Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature. American Literature 1 December 2018; 90 (4): 876–878. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-7208647
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