Editor’s Note

Abstract

ISLE 30.1 opens with the theme of the blue humanities in the article “Noise on the Ocean Before ‘Pollution’: The Voyage of Saint Brendan” by Liam Lewis, who argues that revisiting “The Voyage of Saint Brendan, a short and popular text recounting an Irish saint’s journey across the sea to visit an earthly Paradise ( … ) from an acoustemological perspective can tell us a great deal about the history of noise on the ocean.” Graham Huggan and Pippa Marland, in “Queer Blue Sea: Sexuality and the Aquatic Uncanny in Philip Hoare’s Translantic Eco-narratives,” bring attention to Hoare’s writing in order to “argue for an expanded view of ( … ) eco-narrative—that charts its littoral and oceanic dimensions,” and “claim that Hoare articulates a vision of nature that is both queer and ecological.” Nicholas Tyler Reich’s essay, “Queer Ecology in (Gay) Post-Pastoral Cinema,” “considers how queer ecology complicates the ways in which pastoral gayness on screen imbricates in more-than-human natures and how ecological belonging manifests in a contemporary gay mise-en-scène.” What Reich aims to understand “is the extent of queer work contemporary gay pastoral cinema performs by invoking what Terry Gifford calls the ‘post-pastoral’ mode, in particular.”