‘Edna O’Brien’s Narratives of Self-Fashioning’ begins by noting that even though Edna O’Brien had been publishing novels and receiving considerable public attention since the appearance of her Country Girls Trilogy (1960–4), scholarship on her work only appeared belatedly, starting in the 1990s. The originality of these early novels lay in the frankness with which they addressed sexuality and gender-based violence and oppression in Ireland. Later works, such as A Pagan Place (1970), moved to more experimental forms of writing, and this in turn has opened up ecocritical modes of reading O’Brien’s work, in which the natural world and the human world are intimately connected. In this respect, that early Trilogy provides a template for reading much of O’Brien’s later work, even as she continued to write well into the twenty-first century, insofar as it contains the element of ‘making contact’ that O’Brien identified as the impetus behind her earliest writing.

This chapter repositions William Burroughs as a radical environmental thinker whose apocalyptic visions and experimental prose provide an oblique but vital contribution to ecocriticism. Steen Ledet Christiansen argues that Burroughs’ work – particularly Naked Lunch, The Exterminator, and the Nova trilogy – challenges the limits of environmental representation through stylistic rupture, linguistic sabotage, and the dissolution of the human subject. Burroughs’ toxic narrative landscapes, cut-up methods, and critique of linguistic determinism reveal the entanglement of language, ideology, and environmental degradation. Far from a conventional ecological writer, Burroughs destabilizes anthropocentric frameworks and anticipates posthumanist theories by framing language itself as a viral, controlling force. His fractured narratives expose the environmental imagination to new modes of seeing and being, making him an unlikely but essential figure in rethinking literature’s role in the Anthropocene.

The introduction situates the Anthropocene as a contested concept whose formal rejection by the International Commission on Stratigraphy in 2024 contrasts sharply with its widespread adoption across the humanities. It traces the term’s origins in Crutzen and Stoermer’s proposal, reviews competing “golden spikes,” and examines how debates over dating and definition have shaped cultural discourse. Beyond geology, the Anthropocene emerges as a multidisciplinary figure of thought, raising questions about planetary systems, individual responsibility, and ethical entanglement. The introduction highlights literature’s dual role as historical precursor and critical interlocutor, from Romantic environmental sensibilities and Moby-Dick’s proto-Anthropocene themes to contemporary climate fiction and speculative narratives. It also addresses representational challenges posed by scale and deep time, the politicization of terminology, and alternative framings such as Capitalocene and Chthulucene. Finally, it considers literature’s potential agency in confronting planetary crisis, surveying narrative strategies from apocalyptic imaginaries to realist depictions of “slow violence.” By mapping these debates and tensions, the introduction frames the Anthropocene as both a conceptual battlefield and a lens through which literature negotiates the interwoven histories of humans and Earth.

Ecocriticism is a field of literary and cultural studies that has deep roots, long pre-dating the concept of the Anthropocene in the late twentieth century. There has never been a time when human beings have failed to contemplate our connectedness and disconnectedness with the Earth, but the naming of the discipline in 1978 and its rapid development during the final decades of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty-first century are clearly a response to the sense of urgency spurred by recognition of human impacts on the biosphere, the hallmark of the Anthropocene. This chapter attempts to chart what it suggests are the five major phases (or “waves”) of ecocriticism from 1980 to the present, focusing not only on North American trends but also pointing to comparable patterns in other regions throughout the world. While most ecocritics do not refer explicitly to the Anthropocene, several scholars – such as Stephanie LeMenager, Serpil Oppermann, and Louise Economides – have written articles and books emphasizing the role of ecocriticism and the humanities more generally in responding to the social and ecological impacts of the Anthropocene.

This chapter interrogates the conceptual and methodological trajectories of Anthropocene literary criticism over the past decade, focusing on its persistent blind spots around race and anti-Blackness. While efforts to diversify the Anthropocene literary and theoretical canon have foregrounded Black, Brown, and Indigenous authors, these gestures frequently reproduce extractive logics, instrumentalizing racialized texts as speculative resources for imagining so-called “otherwise worlds.” Drawing on Afropessimism and a recent strand of negativity in the environmental humanities, the chapter argues that Anthropocene criticism must reckon with anti-Blackness as the structural grammar of modernity rather than treating race as an additive category. Through examples from contemporary criticism and archival readings, including William Wells Brown’s Clotel, the chapter calls for a radical reorientation: reading for race in ways that resist the gentrification of Black literature and confront the ontological foundations of the Anthropocene itself.

This chapter examines Allen Ginsberg’s “Plutonian Ode” as a powerful expression of ecological concern shaped by the poet’s long-standing engagement with industrial modernity. Building on earlier works such as “Howl,” Ginsberg’s poem intensifies his critique of environmental degradation, using vivid language and mythic imagery to address the ethical and existential implications of nuclear technology. I trace the evolution of Ginsberg’s ecological thought, arguing that “Plutonian Ode” reflects Ginsberg’s deepening awareness of humanity’s complex relationship with nature and technology. The poem’s fragmented form mirrors the disorientation of nuclear threat, while its ritualistic references reframe technological advancement as both reverent and destructive. Drawing on ecocritical frameworks, the chapter highlights how Ginsberg positions poetry as a vehicle for reflection and resistance. Rather than offering simple solutions, “Plutonian Ode” invites readers to consider the long-term impact of environmental decisions and to reflect on the responsibilities shared in an increasingly uncertain ecological future.

As climate awareness intensifies in the first decades of the twenty-first century, theatre and performance studies continues to reflect on and revise the depth of its engagement with ecology, understood broadly as the interrelationships between organisms and their environments. ‘From Ecology to Ecocriticism’ covers the rise of ecology first as a science then its gradual shift to the humanities and onto theatre and performance studies. The question of the relationship between humans and nature now animates much of the scholarship on ecology, theatre and performance. Hence, if ecology is the study of the interrelations between organisms and environments, then ecology in theatre studies focuses on the interrelations of the theatrical and its referents in the politics of sentence at climate change. The chapter concludes by arguing that ecocriticism in Australia expands to encompass the impact of settler colonialism and the continuing dependence on fossil fuel consumption and exports.

Creative engagement with the Arthurian myth has been prolific in the modern period and shows no sign of abating. This chapter provides a panoramic shot, an overview of how and where the Arthurian myth surfaces in texts in English in Great Britain and Ireland from 1920 to the present. Additionally, it provides close-ups, more detailed readings of selected works that capture the critical concerns of modern artists and their audiences, foregrounding especially trauma and the impacts of war and industrialised culture; expressions of the interconnectedness between all living things, often in response to contextual ecopolitical crises; and human interactions, including tragic relationships and empowering female networks. The discussion breaks materials into broad categories that are loosely determined by form – poetry, prose and drama – and moves between foundational works and newer narratives. Where possible, the discussion foregrounds Arthuriana that has previously received little or no attention, especially works by women.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre has a great deal to say about listening, especially in contrast to looking. This Chapter demonstrates that in Pericles visual modes of perception are imbricated in regimes of power and exploitation, while audition is presented as a way out. When characters in the play lend their ears to sounds and voices that are all-too-often silenced, ignored, or drowned out – especially those belonging to women and the natural world – they are miraculously redeemed and regenerated. Marina’s voice, in particular, drives the drama toward its happy conclusion. To account for the power of her voice, I turn to Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and David Kleinberg-Levin, each of whom takes aim at the oppressiveness of logocentrism, celebrating instead the enlivening energies of the pre-semantic and extra-verbal. As do these authors, Pericles associates the plenipotent voice of the play with the feminine, the more-than-human, and the beyond-meaning, indicating that these can usher us into productive and ethical relationships with others and our world.

This chapter examines some of the ways in which African literatures have interacted with and related to trends and turns in ecocriticism specifically and the environmental humanities more broadly. Reading a long history of environmental writing from the continent, the chapter aims to complicate how ecological thinking in African literatures – and by extension postcolonial literatures, more generally – has often become conflated with narratives of decolonization. Offering some examples of ecocritical work, including by Rob Nixon, Cajetan Iheka, and Byron Caminero-Santangelo, the chapter will also demonstrate that an African ecocritical perspective has indeed “not arrived belatedly.” However, rather than starting with the mid twentieth century, the chapter returns to authors from the beginning of the twentieth century for the ways in which earlier forms of anti-colonial politics can be seen to be articulated through an ecological imaginary that predates formal decolonization by almost half a century.

Eoin Flannery, in his chapter, examines what happens when the revivalist promise of the future has curdled into something else, an inevitability of history rather than the positing power of the artist. It is one thing to accept a faded ideal as the motivating trope of a latter-day revivalist novel; it is quite another thing to turn away from ideals altogether and to accept, even to embrace, a world defined less by cultural aspirations than financial schemes, debt and “ecosickness.” The refusal to adopt traditional revivalist reference points and temporal frameworks leads writers as diverse as Kevin Berry, Anne Haverty, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, and Mike McCormack to offer narratives that range from financial degradation to social collapse. One result of this refusal is the effort to foreground language, style, voice, and the vitality and exuberance of storytelling that is a hallmark of revivalist art, an advancing light into a potentially dark future.

Ecocriticism is catching up with James Joyce. Moving beyond the heritage of Romanticism’s binary opposition between human and nonhuman nature, contemporary critics have explored the entanglement of nature, culture, and the built environment in Joyce’s works. This chapter focuses on Joyce’s evolving presentation of the human body as a natural–cultural entity. His early fictions depict the body as a humbling counterweight to notions of transcendence, especially to Catholic ideas glorifying the spirit. The evolution of his thinking culminates in his portrayal of the body, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as a site of constant transformation, where the human and the nonhuman interpenetrate and shape each other. An influential concept of material ecocriticism is Stacy Alaimo’s ‘trans-corporeality’, which reveals the interlinkage and imbrication of our bodies with each other and ‘more-than-human nature’. Thus, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, even biologically dead bodies of the solar system intersect the characters’ lives, through both their material environments and the senses, microbes, and atoms of their bodies.

This chapter considers The History of Mary Prince as an environmental history and demonstrates how Mary Prince theorized environmental justice from the perspective of an African descended woman who labored in the trenches of ecological imperialism and envisioned liberation. In studying Prince’s text, we can better understand how the interwoven systems of slavery and colonialism altered the natural world and also how imperialism, as a formalized ideological structure administered in the colonies as well as in the metropole, always left its imprint on the environment. The chapter argues that Prince demands a geography of freedom that is outside of the colonial-defined borders of the Caribbean islands, calling for an end to both slavery and ecological imperialism. In making this argument, it examines a series of vivid moments in Prince’s environmental history to catalogue Prince’s anti-imperialist geography. Further, this chapter also considers Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s theoretical neologism, tidalectics, as an entryway to comprehending Prince’s conceptualization of the marine landscapes of the islands she traversed.

This chapter surveys both the rich tradition of Renaissance botanical literature and some of the critical strategies currently developing around them: ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and critical plant studies. It focuses on the co-existence of myth and science in Renaissance botanical texts and the capacity of Renaissance literature to clarify the advantages and drawbacks of bestowing personhood on plants. Renaissance literature reveals the socio-political, intellectual, and aesthetic processes by which plants became hostage to two separate cultures: the scientific and aesthetic. The chapter also argues that a properly historicised view of Renaissance plant writing might in some respects make early modern texts more relevant to the present by reviving pre-Enlightenment worldviews and pre-Industrial notions of ecological enmeshment.