2Ecocriticism

Abstract

This review of publications in the field of ecocriticism in 2019 comprises seven sections: 1. Introduction: Ecocriticism, Climate Change, and COVID-19; 2. Anthropocene Ecocriticism; 3. Affective Ecocriticism; 4. Postcolonial Ecocriticism; 5. Zoocriticism and Phytocriticism; 6. Ecocriticism and Ecomedia Studies; 7. Conclusion.The review focuses on six monographs, one edited book, and two journal issues. Ecocriticism publications in 2019 reflect an imperative to devise new means of signification in response to planetary concerns. The biospheric urgencies of the Anthropocene and its catastrophic imprint of climate change continue to draw ecocritical attention to issues of time, scale, embodiment, and affect. Attuned to the Anthropocene context, 2019 publications demonstrate sustained attention to posthumanist thinking, including more-than-human ontologies. More specifically, the year brought valuable additions to postcolonial ecocriticism, affective ecocriticism, and zoocriticism as well as strides in the theorization of ecophobia. New directions in phytocriticism, hydrocriticism, and sumbiocriticism (an ecocritical mode attentive to the manner in which a text engages ideas of symbiosis) evince the field’s ongoing diversification within the environmental humanities ambit. 2019 saw significant developments in ecopoetic studies as well as highly generative confluences between ecocriticism and ecomedia studies, two complementary fields regarded historically as separate domains. The extension of ecocritical methods to the literatures of Turkey, Pakistan, Cuba, and other non-anglophone contexts signifies the continuous evolution of the field beyond its provenance in British and American studies of nature writing.