FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

Drafts of all of the manuscripts below have been completed and are awaiting publication.

Empirical Ecocriticism

A central premise of ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities more generally, is that narratives play a significant role in shaping human relationships with the nonhuman world. Over the past ten years, empirical ecocriticism has emerged as an inter- and transdisciplinary subfield of ecocriticism that focuses on the empirically grounded study of environmental narratives in a variety of genres and media, along with their influence on various audiences. It relies on social science methods but also employs humanistic methods to analyze the thematic, formal, aesthetic, and contextual features of narratives that the social sciences typically do not take into account. It is an often collaborative endeavor that aims to gain a better understanding of the role of environmental narratives in influencing people’s awareness, attitudes, and behavior in a time of rapid social and ecological transformation.

(for LIVE Handbook Environmental Humanities, edited by Evi Zemanek and Timo Müller. Metzler/Springer)

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