Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination

Edited by Vin Nardizzi and Tiffany Jo Werth

Tell us about your new book. What is its central project?

This collection of 12 essays grew out of a conference, “Oecologies: Engaging the World, from Here” held in Vancouver, British Columbia and sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under the Oecologies (www.oecologies.com) banner. We invited scholars from six countries—Australia, Canada, England, South Africa, South Korea, and the United States—along with locals from British Columbia to talk about how where they live effects how they teach premodern literature. The conference theme emerged from the sense many of us shared that the twenty-first century western Pacific Coast lies far away in time and place from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. My collaborator, Vin Nardizzi, and I gathered medievalists and early modernists to think about how we as scholars and teachers might connect our students—from various places on the planet—to another continent, time, and place.

What got you started thinking about this set of problems in this way?

The conference spotlighted how different local environments shape how we as scholars think about the past and how we teach that past. For example, Patricia Badir talks about the long history behind a stretch of the now defunct Kettle Valley Railway near Hope, BC whose stations were named after Shakespearean characters. One day while on a hike, David Matthews became curious about why an air shaft along a railway line was designed to look like a medieval turret and began to explore the neo-Gothic impulse behind the architectural history of railway stations and tunnels in norther England. Louise Noble became fascinated—and a little horrified—by how the fresh water landscape of seventeenth-century England was transported to the arid landscape of colonial Australia via what she calls a “hydraulic imaginary." My now fellow UC Davis colleague, Frances Dolan, discovered fascinating self-consciously premodern practices of terroir being used and invoked in advertising by biodynamic winegrowers in California. Throughout the edited volume, the authors trace the legacies of cosmopolitanism, the creation of the global south, and enduring pipelines, roadways, and railways that witness to the force of a premodern imaginary. All together the essays yield a rich sense of what Robert Rouse calls in the preface, an “emplaced environmental reading.” Our contributors meditate not only on the texts that they are reading, but on where they are reading them. As contributors seek to understand “place” across different hubs in time and space, they also engage with a dynamic conversation across and amongst chapters so that concepts like Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “eco-temps” weaves its way into several chapters. 

We were especially thrilled that Ursula K. Heise, well known for her work in contemporary speculative fiction and environmental studies, wrote the afterword. Her influential 2008 book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global prompted us to ask questions about tensions between the local environment and global trends. The volume is deeply invested with these questions as well as being indebted to the kind of work undertaken in Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero’s Premodern Sexualities, which attempts to show how contemporary thinking has enormous relevance to the study of the past and vice versa. This book reflects a long history of entangled actual and imaginary landscapes and thus illuminates connections between them in ways I did not initially expect. 

If you could pair your book with one other text, what would you recommend? Why?

When my co-editor and I were writing the introduction, we returned to Sir Thomas More’s early sixteenth-century text Utopia. It provided a guide for how we too might find the portals between literal and imaginative places within the template of a scholarly conversation. There too we found ways to juxtapose “here and now” with “there and then.” In terms of secondary materials, our volume travels a parallel path to a few titles within the burgeoning field of premodern literary ecocriticism: among them, Renaissance Posthumanism, edited by Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano (2016), as well as the informal trilogy launched by Jeffery Jerome Cohen Prismatic Ecology (2013) and co-edited with Lowell Duckert Elemental Ecocriticsm (2015) and Veer Ecology (2017). 

Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination was published by University of Toronto Press.