Transcultural Ecocriticism: Global, Romantic and Decolonial Perspectives begins with a stirring manifesto written by its editors Stuart Cooke and Peter Denney:
All around us, bodies, texts and artworks are converging in old and new forms of politics and earthly accountabilities … Never before has the world been smaller, but never has it been so overwhelming in its complexity … Suddenly, the critical project has become planetary, biological, even geological … The use of imaginative, synthetic scholarship has never been more important … Transcultural ecocriticism emerges in response to these concerns.
This messianic sense of everything happening at once, converging and emerging with unprecedented urgency, is one of the symptoms of writing in the Anthropocene. The proclamation of this era announces the Anthropocene as a new master signifier that constellates contemporary experience within its terrible, grim gravity. As well as articulating the urgency of the moment, the book’s introduction also smartly…