This edited volume, The Wounded Earth: Narratives of Trauma, Ecology & Memory, gathers twelve interdisciplinary chapters that critically examine the entanglements of environmental degradation, historical trauma, and cultural memory across global literary traditions. The volume investigates non-Western literary traditions, including Sinophone diaspora narratives, Arabic children’s literature that addresses environmental consciousness, and contemporary Chinese works that employ ethnographic modes to document indigenous ecological knowledge while demonstrating literature’s capacity to articulate experiences that exceed instrumental reason. Spanning European, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and North American contexts, these writings collectively argue that narrative constitutes an essential site where environmental ethics and historical reckoning converge within the planetary condition of the Anthropocene. Ultimately, Volume VII of the Contemporary Studies on Language and Literature series positions literary study as indispensable to understanding how ecological relationality might be reimagined within the disabled ecologies of our wounded earth.
Table of Contents
Interspecies Grief in the Eco Crip Sensorium of Rachelle Atalla’s Thirsty Animals
Arianna Introna
Paradisiacal Cuisine, Utopian Dreams: Food in Early Modern French Descriptions of Louisiana’s Environment
Aglaia Maretta Venters
John Fowles’s The Tree: A Precursor to the Plant Humanities
Nesrin Yavaş
Über die widerständige Praxis des Hungerns: Han Kangs Die Vegetarierin im Kontext ökofeministischer Ansätze
Nina-Marie Schüchter
Water and Embodied Women’s Agency: Narrating Eco-Emotions at the Turn of the 19th to the 20th Centuries
Inna Livytska
Topografien des Verlusts: Mensch, Natur und Zivilisation im Werk W. G. Sebalds
Ersin Münüklu
Die exilierten Körper im Schatten von Migration und kultureller Kontrolle: Die Erzählung der Bio-Macht in Necla Keleks Werk Die Fremde Braut
Ayşegül Aycan Solaker
Literary Ethnography as Eco-Critical Practice in Contemporary Chinese Literature: Chi Zi-Jian, Li Juan, and A-Lai
Xiaozhu Zhuang
The Environment in Arabic Children’s Picture Books: An Ecocritical Reading of When The Whale Sneezed and When The War Ends
Nejood Al-Rubaye & Barbara Bakker
Aftermath of Empire: Trauma, Diaspora, and the Postcolonial Formation in the Post-1980s Sinophone Literature
Xiaozhu Zhuang
Reflective Nostalgia in East Germany and East Asia: An Analysis of in Times of Fading Light and The Astonishing Color of After
Marie Jensen
A Farewell to Meaning: Ernest Hemingway’s Literary Response to Global Crisis in World War I
Elias Mehdawi
