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"Stone maps the force, vivacity, and stories within our most mundane matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined metaphor for the "really real": blunt factuality, nature's curt rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with fire from the sky, emerge through the subterranean lovemaking of the elements, tumble along riverbeds from Eden, partner with the masons who build worlds with them. Such motion suggests an ecological enmeshment and an almost creaturely mineral life.Although geological time can leave us reeling, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that stone's endurance is also an invitation to apprehend the world in other than human terms. Never truly inert, stone poses a profound challenge to modernity's disenchantments. Its agency undermines the human desire to be separate from the environment, a bifurcation that renders nature "out there," a mere resource for recreation, consumption, and exploitation.Written with great verve and elegance, this pioneering work is notable not only for interweaving the medieval and the modern but also as a major contribution to ecotheory. Comprising chapters organized by concept --"Geophilia," "Time," "Force," and "Soul"--Cohen seamlessly brings together a wide range of topics including stone's potential to transport humans into nonanthropocentric scales of place and time, the "petrification" of certain cultures, the messages fossils bear, the architecture of Bordeaux and Montparnasse, Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste disposal, the ability of stone to communicate across millennia in structures like Stonehenge, and debates over whether stones reproduce and have souls.Showing that what is often assumed to be the most lifeless of substances is, in its own time, restless and forever in motion, Stone fittingly concludes by taking us to Iceland--a land that, writes the author, "reminds us that stone like water is alive, that stone like water is transient." "--

Gathering into lively conversation scholars in medieval, early modern and object studies, Inhuman Nature explores the activity of the things, forces, and relations that enable, sustain and operate indifferently to us. Enamored by fictions of environmental sovereignty, we too often imagine "human" to be a solitary category of being. This collection of essays maps the heterogeneous and asymmetrical ecologies within which we are enmeshed, a material world that makes the human possible but also offers difficulties and resistance. Among the topics explored are the futurity that inheres in storms and wrecks, wood that resists its burning or offers art and dwelling, hymns that implant themselves like viruses, the ontology of everyday objects, the seep and flow of substance, the resistant nature of matter, the dependence of community upon making things public, and the interstices at which nature and culture become inseparable. Tinker as you will.

Animal, Mineral, Vegetable examines what happens when we cease to assume that only humans exert agency. Through a careful examination of medieval, early modern and contemporary lifeworlds, these essays collectively argue against ecological anthropocentricity. Sheep, wolves, camels, flowers, chairs, magnets, landscapes, refuse and gems are more than mere objects. They act; they withdraw; they make demands; they connect within lively networks that might foster a new humanism, or that might proceed with indifference towards human affairs. Through what ethics do we respond to these activities and forces? To what futures do these creatures and objects invite us, especially when they appear within the texts and cultures of the "distant" past?

Between diaspora and conquest : Norman assimilation in Marie de France's Esope and Petrus Alfonsi's Disciplina clericalis / Suzanne Conklin Akbari -- Reliquia : writing relics in Anglo-Norman Durham / Heather Blurton -- Cultural difference and the meaning of Latinity in Asser's Life of King Alfred / David Townsend -- Green children from another world, or, The archipelago in England / Jeffrey Jerome Cohen -- Beyond British boundaries in the Historia regum Britanniae / Michael Wenthe -- Arthur's two bodies and the bare life of the archives / Kathleen Biddick -- The instructive other within : secularized Jews in the siege of Jerusalem / Randy P. Schiff -- Subversive histories : strategies of identity in Scottish historiography / Katherine Terrell -- Sleeping with an elephant : Wales and England in the Mabinogion / Jon Kenneth Williams -- Chaucer and the war of the maidens / John Ganim -- The signs and location of a flight (or return?) of time : the old English wonders of the East and the Gujarat Massacre / Eileen Joy

This review essay maps the convergence of disability studies and queer theory in three recent scholarly volumes. It asks what happens when the models of intercorporeal embodiment they advance meet recent work in materialism and ecological studies.

"What is Environmental Humanities? Over the last three decades, humanities scholars working on environmental matters have moved beyond field-specific and well-delineated descriptors like "environmental history" or "literature and the environment," subdisciplines that had often been outliers in the curricula of History and Literature departments. These scholars produced groundbreaking interdisciplinary work that challenged the primacy of standard narratives of the cultural reproduction of the vexed category of nature, and helped to usher in what we now label the environmental humanities (or EH). EH is a lively and capacious domain of inquiry that includes researchers and writers in Literature, Languages, History, Anthropology, Urban Planning, Philosophy, Political Science, Education, Religion, Classics, Creative Writing, Geography, and Landscape Architecture, as well as scholars of Race and Gender Studies. Working within and across conventional disciplines, EH has over the last decade or so spun out a dazzling set of conceptual and theoretical problems, drawing on feminist, queer, postcolonial, urban, oceanic, posthuman, nonhuman, elemental, prismatic, geologic, digital, indigenous, new materialist, energy, and object oriented ontology theories. In each of these riotous theoretical inquiries, EH scholars have challenged the disciplinary conventions that have

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Foreword -- Introduction: Welcome to the Whirled -- Vegetate -- Globalize -- Commodify -- Power Down -- Obsolesce -- Decorate -- Remember -- Represent -- Compost -- Attune -- Sediment -- Environ -- Shade -- Try -- Rain -- Drown -- Haunt -- Seep -- Saturate -- Behold -- Wait -- Play -- Ape -- Love -- Tend -- Unmoor -- Whirl -- Curl -- Hope -- Afterword: On the Veer -- Acknowledgments -- Errata -- Contributors -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.

For centuries it was believed that all matter was composed of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire in promiscuous combination, bound by love and pulled apart by strife. Elemental theory offered a mode of understanding materiality that did not center the cosmos around the human. Outgrown as a science, the elements are now what we build our houses against. Their renunciation has fostered only estrangement from the material world.The essays collected in Elemental Ecocriticism show how elemental materiality precipitates new engagements with the ecological. Here the classical elements reveal the vitality of supposedly inert substances (mud, water, earth, air), chemical processes (fire), and natural phenomena, as well as the promise in the abandoned and the unreal (ether, phlogiston, spontaneous generation).Decentering the human, this volume provides important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. Three response essays meditate on the connections of this collaborative project to the framing of modern-day ecological concerns. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential of a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.

Emphasising sustainability, balance, and the natural, green dominates our thinking about ecology like no other colour. What about the catastrophic, the disruptive, the inaccessible, and the excessive? What of the ocean's turbulence, the fecundity of excrement, the solitude of an iceberg, multihued contaminations? 'Prismatic Ecology' moves beyond the accustomed green readings of ecotheory and maps a colourful world of ecological possibility