I have often claimed that the two major paradigms within the field of ecocriticism are “place” and “animality.” It is possible, of course, to argue that there are various other themes and concerns in environmentally oriented literary scholarship, ranging from the human capacity (or incapacity) to apprehend phenomena of extreme scale and the ecological implications of our sensory and cognitive limitations for the politics of natural resource exploitation in industrialized and developing nations, to name only a few. But if we’re trying to identify over-arching concepts, our relationships to places of all kinds, small and large, and our understanding of what it means to be alive and to exist in relationship to other living beings may well be the overarching aspects of our “environmental experience.”

This article analyzes the topic of xenotransplantation in American author Brenda Peterson’s novel Animal Heart (2004). The transplanting of a baboon heart into a human patient is analyzed as a case of boundary crossing where the dualisms human/animal and spirit/matter are dismantled. Such a process challenges modern techno-science’s use of human and nonhuman bodies, proposing instead a worldview where matter and its associated terms — animal and body — are reanimated by the practice of panpsychic and animist-relational epistemologies. In light of such a reanimation of matter, this article uses the framework of material ecocriticism to focus on the baboon heart’s nonhuman agentic capacities, which the novelist describes in a way that illustrates the liberating power of literature.

This paper implicitly engages with the homology of disability and animality as it brings together disability studies and animal studies in its analysis of three narratives with “disabled” characters. It suggests new ways of interpreting disability in relation to humans and dogs. Rather than promoting a humanist interpretation which celebrates the agency and autonomy of the individual, the essay argues for a posthumanist reading of common human-animal vulnerabilities via Cary Wolfe’s theory of trans-species shared being and via Ato Quayson’s theory of literary representations of disabilities. Embodied interconnections with a nonhuman animal “resist” representation as the stories extend human disability into other realms of being, both real and metaphysical. Trans-species entanglements in themselves are border-crossing balancing acts; as thresholds, they proffer conduits to a doubled immanence of human and nonhuman animal. Yet trans-species affiliations between people and dogs who are stigmatised engender a certain narrative of “nervousness” in the stories, all of which end tragically in the death of the characters, both human and animal.

This essay illustrates how questions from animal and animality studies can be productively explored in relation to literary and cultural texts, with a particular focus on Mark Doty’s recent bestselling memoir Dog Years. In this text, Doty recounts the illnesses that lead to the deaths of his human partner, Wally, and their two dogs, Arden and Beau. The question of when to “let go” in order to accept a “good death” can be related to biopolitical questions of citizenship and activism: when (or whether) one should stop fighting the kinds of problems that the text presumably wants to resist, such as homophobia, U.S. imperialist aggression in response to 9/11, and speciesist attitudes toward dogs. The implicit assumption of the text is one that resonates with other recent popular illness narratives; we should not fight death to the very end, but rather accept terminal illness as an opportunity to “live in the moment,” supposedly in line with the way that dogs must live their lives. But what are the implications of constructing the inner lives of dogs in this way? And what constitutes a so-called good death, then, if we compare terminal illness with what might be called “terminal injustice?” The focus in this essay is thus on the biopolitics of how Doty’s text constructs both human and nonhuman animals at the end of life.

The poetry of Emily Dickinson and Brenda Hillman casts nonhuman animals as part of the polis. Their perspective resonates with the emergent animal rights theory, explored by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, that draws on political theory in order to rethink animal-human relationships in what they call the zoopolis. Dickinson’s and Hillman’s perspectives further inform the zoopolis. For both poets, animals have earned their place in a multispecies polis because of the self-evident manifestations of their alternative ways-of-making. Such poetry calls for expanding both the poetic tradition and the polis to include other animal makers.

This essay takes as its starting point the challenge posed by Henry David Thoreau’s 1861 essay “Walking”, which suggests that even the shortest walk around the neighborhood should be approached as a quest for wildness, a quest that must be taken up in such a “spirit of undying adventure” that the walker must be prepared “never to return.” The author draws on her personal experiences to explore the ways that such a Thoreauvian walk might take shape in the suburban and urban environments where most people live in the contemporary United States. She proposes that bringing a dog as a companion may enhance the wildness of a walk, despite the ways that dogs can work against many of Thoreau’s values by functioning as distractions and added responsibilities. In this essay, she explains the literary tradition that treats dogs as guides to wildness and the more-than-human world in order to argue that, if we pay proper attention, dogs’ sensory capabilities in particular can point us toward the invisible wild dimensions of the natural world.

This essay takes up the challenge issued by philosopher Val Plumwood to subject our cultural narratives to a critical re-think. The focus is on the narrative that only humans live with and through cultural narratives. Opening the analysis to multi-species cultural narratives, the essay engages with the wider question of what is being lost in the world through the direct and indirect effects of human wreckage. The analysis focuses on philosophical/theological questions of the goodness of creation. Working with the case study of flying-foxes (Pteropus spp) in Australia, the essay proposes that a Levinasian ethics of intersubjective responsibility pervades the plenum of life on earth. Through the work of James Hatley, in particular, the essay offers an enlivened account of symbiotic mutualism as evidence of goodness, and explores the ripples of goodness that flow from mutualism. The cruel violence against flying-foxes is offered as just one example of the ongoing disaster of human rejection of the goodness of creation.

The specter of influence is still haunting literary and cultural studies in the new millennium although postmodern theories have removed disciplinary boundaries that used to fence literature. The orthodox theory of influence, which is defined as the relation of writer to writer and writer to tradition based on the imitation model of literary history, has long been problematized even since the heyday of New Criticism when literature was considered an autonomous entity that only involves writer and text. Taking cues from T.S. Eliot’s emphasis on the order of tradition that canonical writers have presumably made, later New Critics went beyond the authorial intent. Although more sources of influence have been elaborated in textual features to testify to writer’s subjectivity in the formalist criticism, the then dominant approach shares with orthodox theory a notion of influence based on binariness, causality and hierarchy in the tradition of literary order, which from a postcolonial perspective even endorses imperialist cultural hegemony.

Appropriations of Shakespeare in modern drama since the 1960s have become increasingly politicized as they responded to such pressing contemporary issues. This study identifies and discusses two notable kinds of political appropriations: postcolonial revisions of The Tempest in particular and women’s rewritings of Shakespeare in general. Of course, the political component of Shakespeare adaptations in modern drama predated the 1960s. By then the name “Shakespeare” had acquired an array of meanings. It signified not only the historical person and his works, but also the attitudes determined by their receptions from culture to culture. By adapting plays, productions could articulate national aspirations or criticise an existing ideology. Like “Shakespeare,” modern and postmodern playwrights had maintained an international presence which often displayed political bias. The Tempest has generated modern dramas from Brazil to Zambia, usually focusing on the subject of imperialism and race. Probably Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête (1969) remains the best known of this group. Several tragedies — Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear — have inspired women’s plays which raise questions about sexuality and gender. Many of these have been produced and published in English-speaking countries by accomplished playwrights such as MacDonald, Elaine Feinstein and the Women’s Theatre Group, Paula Vogel, and most recently, Young Jean Lee (2010). In a few cases, interesting combinations occur: for example, Philip Osment refers to The Tempest in This Island’s Mine (1988), but he also addresses questions of sexual orientation and the roles of women in twentieth-century Western society. Djanet Sears rewrites Othello in Harlem Duet (1997), yet she explores black history as well as the status of women in contemporary America. Finally, considering these modern plays as a group illuminates each one and simultaneously throws light on a single important path taken by dramatic adaptations of Shakespeare in the late twentieth century.

In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot juxtaposes fragments from the past — from classical antiquity to Dante, Shakespeare, Marvell, Webster, and other authors, so as to enhance the insanity of the modern world and the emptiness of modern city life. Sex is joyless and sterile in The Waste Land and such vision echoes Lear’s vision of the vagina as the mouth of hell as well as the pessimism of sonnet 129. “Th’ expense of spirits in a waste of shame” can thus be regarded as Shakespeare’s exploration of the waste/waist land of desire and sex as well as the Renaissance pictorial tradition of anthropomorphized landscape. Shakespeare’s music thus serves Eliot as a foil or ironical counterpoint to call attention to the seedy realities of modern love. Shakespearean echoes in The Waste Land serve to comfort Eliot’s pessimism even though the allusions to The Tempest may be taken as a way of restoring or re-creating a less lurid or dreary world view.

In his comedies as well as tragedies, Shakespeare confronts the themes of honour and shame, male social standing, female chastity and subordination of women, questioning the prevailing patriarchal attitudes of his time, which victimise both men and women. This article is intended to make a comparative analysis of honour-related crime as Shakespeare alludes to again and again in his dramatic works and as they appear today in honour-centred societies, the Middle Eastern cultures in particular, where honour killings still hold a notable weight. Bringing together Shakespearean examples and its contemporary extensions as practices by traditional cultures, the study reveals that honour-related violence, whether in Shakespeare’s time or societies today, East and West, has been an ongoing issue, and neither the Renaissance as an age of great discoveries nor technological advances of the twenty-first century managed to wipe out this practice. The analysis demonstrates that honour-related violence which occupies a significant space in Shakespeare’s texts also serves the richness and diversity of his dramatic oeuvre, and therefore this particular subject is worth investigating further from broader historical contexts and contemporary perspectives.

Since Greene and Shakespeare crossed paths on several occasions, this paper will argue that Greene’s influence does matter if we are interested in Shakespeare’s “anxiety of influence.” Several clues in his plays suggest that Shakespeare felt the need to reassert his authorial self as a response to Greene’s attack on the originality of his work. For instance, he gave up collaborative writing for several years and made a sarcastic allusion to the death of his rival in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Hamlet, Polonius’s allusion to the “vile phrase” should be read as an ironic reminder of Greene’s quip. It is not until he wrote The Winter’s Tale, a dramatization of Greene’s Pandosto, that Shakespeare was able to come to terms with his “anxiety of influence.” With Autolycus, he paid a last vibrant and humorous tribute to Greene’s popular ballads and romances.

Marjorie Perloff’s newly released Poetics in a New Key (2013) offers a dynamic perspective to her theory on poetic criticism. The book demonstrates some academic dialogue between Perloff and Harold Bloom over years, which reveals the subtle change in Perloff’s critical ideas. The focuses of the dialogue — aesthetic criticism, language as subject, and concern with reality — constitute the core value of Perloff’s “differential reading,” which witnesses her critical absorption of both New Criticism and Cultural Criticism and leads her to a discovery of “the other tradition” — the tradition of suggestive poetry neglected and rejected by New Criticism which devoted itself to the tradition of “symbolistic poetry.”

Present throughout Marjorie Perloff’s poetry and poetics study, poetic genealogy study, combining harmoniously with her concepts of poetic lag, poetic contextuality, and differential reading, becomes a ladder which leads to a summit of poetic study. Different from Harold Bloom’s poetic genealogy study in a framework of western canon, Perloff constructs a multi-poetic genealogy of British and American poetry and poetics in an open poetic framework, and thus forms a unique “personal poetry canon.”

In order to promote international academic exchange in the field of literary criticism, The International Association for Ethical Literary Criticism (IAELC) will collaborate with the School of Foreign Languages of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the A&HCI scholarly journal Foreign Literature Studies at the School of Humanities of Central China Normal University (Wuhan, China) in hosting “The 4th International Symposium on Ethical Literary Criticism” from December 19 to December 22, 2014, at Shanghai, China. Scholars and literary critics all over the world are welcome.

Fourteen years into the twenty-first century, we are at a point when reflection on what has been achieved by novelists in the new century is possible and indeed offers a unique critical opportunity to look at what is happening now in fiction. The first decade of the 2000s has been saliently marked for its fictional creativity and diversity. Twenty-first century fictional writing is particularly noted for its peculiarly rich features, which entail the implications of entering into a new century and the potent symbolic evocations arising from the millennial and post-millennial discourses. Responding to such a complexity of ethical environment involving the natural catastrophe, 9/11 attack and its consequential war on terror, peak oil, and the financial collapse and its aftermath, contemporary novelists have not only transformed mechanics of narrative but also captured and recounted events in an ethical light. In seeking to capture the novelistic responses to our twenty-first century contemporaneity, a number of critics have embarked upon this scholarly endeavor, which is evidenced in most recent scholarly works such as Peter Boxall’s Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (2013) and Siân Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard’s edited collection Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now (2013).