'Finalist' in the PROSE Award (2022) for Language & LinguisticsAwarded Honors at the Storytelling World Awards 2022Linking the ongoing ecological crisis with contemporary conditions of alienation and disenchantment in modern society, this book investigates the capacity of oral storytelling to reconnect people to the natural world and enchant and renew their experience of nature, place and their own existence in the world.

Avatar and Nature Spirituality explores the cultural and religious significance of James Cameron's film Avatar (2010), one of the most commercially successful motion pictures of all time. Its success was due in no small measure to the beauty of the Pandora landscape and the dramatic, heart-wrenching plight of its nature-venerating inhabitants. To some audience members, the film was inspirational, leading them to express affinity with the film's message of ecological inter...

Contemporary visions of the future have been shaped by hopes and fears about the effects of human technology and global capitalism on the natural world. In an era of climate change, mass extinction, and oil shortage, such visions have become increasingly catastrophic, even apocalyptic. Exploring the close relationship between science fiction, ecology, and environmentalism, the essays in Green Planets consider how science fiction writers have been working through this crisis. Beginning with...

The Handbook of Contemporary Animism brings together an international team of scholars to examine the full range of animist worldviews and practices. The volume opens with an examination of recent approaches to animism. This is followed by evaluations of ethnographic, cognitive, literary, performative, and material culture approaches, as well as advances in activist and indigenous thinking about animism. This handbook will be invaluable to students and scholars of Religion, Sociol...

Today there is a bewildering diversity of views on ecology and the natural environment. With more than two hundred distinct and valuable perspectives on the natural world—and with scientists, economists, ethicists, activists, philosophers, and others often taking completely different stances on the issues—how can we come to agreement to solve our toughest environmental problems?In response to this pressing need, Integral Ecology unites valuable insights from multiple persp...

Myth is oral, collective, sacred, and timeless. Fantasy is a modern literary mode and a popular entertainment. Yet the two have always been inextricably intertwined. Stories about Stories examines fantasy as an arena in which different ways of understanding myth compete and new relationships with myth are worked out. The book offers a comprehensive history of the modern fantastic as well as an argument about its nature and importance. Specific chapters cover the origins of fantasy...

The degrading environment of the planet is something that touches everyone. This 2011 book offers an introductory overview of literary and cultural criticism that concerns environmental crisis in some form. Both as a way of reading texts and as a theoretical approach to culture more generally, 'ecocriticism' is a varied and fast-changing set of practices which challenges inherited thinking and practice in the reading of literature and culture. This introduction defines what ecocriticism is...

The what, why and how of storytelling and storywork to promote environmental mindfulness and sustainable behaviour in adults and children.Written by 21 cutting-edge professionals in story-based learning and pro-environmental change.Shows how to apply this practice, indoors and outdoors, in organisations, NGOs, schools, colleges and communities.A treasury of over 40 stories, many creative activities and detailed descriptions of inspiring practice for both new and seasoned practitioners. Cle...

Science fiction loves strangeness. It relishes oddities, even when it piles on fear and dystopian loathing. The technical term for a fascination with the strange and alien is xenophilia, just as the term for a terror of the strange is xenophobia. At its core, then, science fiction is...Xeno Fiction. So science fiction seeks out the strange, roams far from home in space and time, looks with avid eagerness upon the ways of the Others, human or alien. It participates, in brilliantly lighted i...

Nominated for the BSFA Awards 2017 for non-fiction and cover art!'This is an essential guide to help readers and writers of fantasy know their grimdark from their urban, dark, epic, high and metaphysical fantasy. International fantasy author A J Dalton explains how each of the sub-genres of fantasy literature is a response to their own social and historical period. Each sub-genre thereby describes a distinct political and philosophical outlook. Fantasy is far more important than ma...

Research Through, With and As Storying explores how Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars can engage with storying as a tool that disassembles conventions of research. The authors explore the concept of storying across different cultures, times and places, and discuss principles of storying and storying research, considering Indigenous, feminist and critical theory standpoints. Through the book, Phillips and Bunda provide an invitation to locate storying as a valuable ontological...