University of Virginia Press Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies (Under the Sign of Nature)

Review An excellent book with an innovative approach that addresses many of the most vibrant and relevant topics in the field today. It will provide an inspiring guide for scholars interested in Italian literature, but will much more broadly offer a noteworthy contribution to the current debates across ecocriticism and in every region. --Heather Sullivan, Trinity UniversityIovino (Univ. of Turin, Italy), Cesaretti (Univ. of Virginia), and Past (Wayne State Univ.) have edited a collection of essays in response to events and trends negatively impacting Italy--including a burning oil refinery, earthquakes, and illegal toxic dumping.... The collection offers an interesting, multidisciplinary approach to environmental issues from a variety of unusual viewpoints.... Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --author of CHOICE Product Description Bringing together new writing by some of the field's most compelling voices from the United States and Europe, this is the first book to examine Italy--as a territory of both matter and imagination--through the lens of the environmental humanities. The contributors offer a wide spectrum of approaches--including ecocriticism, film studies, environmental history and sociology, eco-art, and animal and landscape studies--to move past cliche and reimagine Italy as a hybrid, plural, eloquent place. Among the topics investigated are post-seismic rubble and the stratifying geosocial layers of the Anthropocene, the landscape connections in the work of writers such as Calvino and Buzzati, the contaminated fields of the ecomafia's trafficking, Slow Food's gastronomy of liberation, poetic birds and historic forests, resident parasites, and nonhuman creatures.At a time when the tension between the local and the global requires that we reconsider our multiple roots and porous place-identities, Italy and the Environmental Humanities builds a creative critical discourse and offers a series of new voices that will enrich not just nationally oriented discussions, but the entire debate on environmental culture. Contributors: Marco Armiero, Royal Institute of Technology at Stockholm * Franco Arminio, Writer, poet, and filmmaker * Patrick Barron, University of Massachusetts * Damiano Benvegnu, Dartmouth College and the Oxford Center for Animal Ethics * Viktor Berberi, University of Minnesota, Morris * Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University * Luca Bugnone, University of Turin * Enrico Cesaretti, University of Virginia *Almo Farina, University of Urbino * Sophia Maxine Farmer, University of Wisconsin-Madison * Serena Ferrando, Colby College * Tiziano Fratus, Writer, poet, and tree-seeker * Matteo Gilebbi, Duke University * Andrea Hajek, University of Warwick * Marcus Hall, University of Zurich * Serenella Iovino, University of Turin * Andrea Lerda, freelance curator * Roberto Marchesini, Study Center of Posthuman Philosophy in Bologna * Marco Moro, Editor-in-Chief of Edizioni Ambiente, Milan * Elena Past, Wayne State University * Carlo Petrini, Founder of International Slow Food Movement * Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, Miami University (Ohio)* Monica Seger, College of William and Mary * Pasquale Verdicchio, University of California, San Diego  About the Author Serenella Iovino is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Turin and the author of Ecocritism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation, winner of the 2016 Book Prize from the American Association for Italian Studies and of the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies.Enrico Cesaretti is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Virginia and the author of Fictions of Appetite: Alimentary Discourses in Italian Modernist Literature.Elena Past is Associate Professor of Italian at Wayne State University and the author of Methods of Murder: Beccarian Introspection and Lombrosian Vivisection in Italian Crime Fiction.