Anticipatory Environmental (Hi)Stories from Antiquity to the Anthropocene

Christopher Schliephake; Evi Zemanek

doi:10.5771/9781666921151

Summary

Anticipatory Environmental (Hi)Stories from Antiquity to the Anthropocene studies the interplay of environmental perception and the way societies throughout history have imagined the future state of “nature” and the environments in which coming generations would live. What sorts of knowledge were and are involved in outlining future environments? What kinds of texts and narrative strategies were and are developed and modified over time? How did and do scenarios and narratives of the past shape (hi)stories of the future? This book answers these questions from a diachronic as well as a cross-cultural perspective. By looking at a diverse range of historical evidence that transcends stereotypical utopian and dystopian visions and allows for nuanced insights beyond the dichotomous reservoir of pastoral motifs and apocalyptic narratives, the contributors illustrate the multifaceted character of environmental anticipation across the ages.

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Bibliographic data

Edition: 1/2023
Copyright year: 2023
ISBN-Print: 978-1-6669-2114-4
ISBN-Online: 978-1-6669-2115-1
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 326
Product type: Edited Book

1. Contents No access
2. Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 22
1. Experience and Expectations: Hesiod on Work, Justice, and Environment No access
2. Ancient Geographies of Health and Environmental Acumen No access
3. The Past is a Foreign Environment No access
4. Future Imperfect in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579) No access
5. Retrospective Prophecy in Contemporary Maya Literature No access
1. Feeling Like a Species No access
2. Anticipating Multispecies Thinking in Plutarch’s Animal Treatises No access
3. William Temple Hornaday’s Haunting Vision of a Wildlife Apocalypse No access
4. Anticipating Extinction No access
5. Narrating Civilizational Collapse in the Anthropocene No access
1. Sensing Noise, Sensing Space No access
2. The Arcologies of Paolo Soleri No access
3. Utopia’s User Interface No access
1. Solastalgia, Future Memory, and Polluted Landscapes in Lucan’s Bellum Civile 7 No access
2. Nuclear Winter No access
3. “Nature in Order” or Human Agency? Visions of the Future in the Long Nineteenth-Century Newspaper No access
4. Explaining Climate Change and Predicting its Impacts No access
5. Ecology in a Loop No access
Index No access Pages 311 - 320
About the Contributors No access Pages 321 - 326