: Kate Rigby
: Dancing with Disaster Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times
: University of Virginia Press
: 9780813936895
: 1
: CHF 34.60
:
: Belletristik
: English
The calamitous impacts of climate change that are beginning to be feltaround the world today expose the inextricability of human and natural histories. Arguing for a morecomplex account of such calamities, Kate Rigby examines a variety of past disasters, from the BlackDeath of the Middle Ages to the mega-hurricanes of the twenty-first century, revealing thedynamic interaction of diverse human and nonhuman factors in their causation, unfolding, andaftermath. Focusing on the link between the ways disasters are framed by thestories told about them and how people tend to respond to them in practice, Rigby also shows howworks of narrative fiction invite ethical reflection on human relations with one another, with ouroften unruly earthly environs, and with other species in the face of eco-catastrophe. In itsinvestigation of an array of authors from the Romantic period to the present-includingHeinrich von Kleist, Mary Shelley, Theodor Storm, Colin Thiele, and Alexis Wright-Dancing with Disaster demonstrates the importance of the environmental humanitiesin the development of more creative, compassionate, ecologically oriented, and socially justresponses to the perils and possibilities of the Anthropocene.Under the Sign ofNature: Explorations in Ecocriticism