Transatlantic landscapes, environmental awareness, literature, and the arts

Abstract

Transatlantic Landscapes: Environmental Awareness, Literature and the Arts considers culture as an outcome of nature as its fundamental principle. The biosemiotic suggestion that life itself is a process of signification, the hypothesis that the immediate contact with the environment of oral cultures still breathes in literate cultures and texts, the new understandings of the agency of nature, the common good that inspires Western political constitutions and Amerindian concepts such as sumak kawsay, and the attention of ecological economics to the interdependence and co-evolution of human societies and natural ecosystems have all been of great relevance. Favoring comparative studies of artistic and literary landscapes from both sides of the Atlantic and the islands between them, Transatlantic Landscapes: Environmental Awareness, Literature and the Arts challenges the epic values of conquering and dominating nature, responds to the culture of modeling spaces at the exclusive service of humankind, turns Euro-American anthropocentrism into a powerful eco-cultural tool to unveil human hubris and to revise its own conceptions of inhabiting the world, and promotes perspectives of accordance and collaboration among a wide range of different cultural traditions.