Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature Unsettling the Anthropocene

Introduction: Literary Cosmology in the Anthropocene 

Part I: CONTEXT / THEORY: From Chaos to Cosmos to Anthropocene? 

Chapter 1: Cosmos within and beyond the Environmental Humanities

Chapter 2: Cosmos Today: Modern, Transcultural, (Dis)enchanted 

Part II: COLONISATION / EXPLOITATION: Reimagining Agriculture and Extraction 

Chapter 3: Remembering the Language of Colonial Agriculture: Carrie Tiffany’s Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living 

Chapter 4: Resisting Mining and Regenerating Country through the Wiradjuri Language: Tara June Winch’s The Yield 

Part III: BIOETHICS / TECHNOLOGY: Revising Human Mastery Narratives 

Chapter 5: Testing the Limits of Apocalyptic Climate Fiction: Briohny Doyle’s The Island Will Sink 

Chapter 6: Reconsidering Evolution and Queering Environmentalism: Ellen van Neerven’s “Water” 

Part IV: ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE / CUSTODIANSHIP: Towards a Sovereign Cosmopolitics 

Chapter 7: Remembering the Opposite of Oppression: Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains 

Chapter 8: Aquatious Mobilisation of Indigenous Sovereignty: Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip 

Conclusion

Biography

Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of New English Literatures and Cultures, Goethe University Frankfurt. Her areas of focus are transcultural Anglophone Literature, Ecocriticism and Intergenerational Justice. She earned her PhD within the joint programme between Goethe and Monash University in Melbourne.

"Bartha-Mitchell’s book is an impressive achievement. The theoretical field, which she traces with such consistent care and detail, is formidable and one where its voices often speak at unacknowledged cross-purposes […] The book’s value lies not just in its productive readings of contemporary Australian prose fiction, but as a concise map of environmental critique.” 

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Chair of Australian Literature, University of Western Australia, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Australia

"An innovative intervention in the environmental humanities, this thought-provoking study of contemporary Australian literature makes a powerful case for the generative concept of cosmos and, more broadly, for the importance of literary studies within the wider field." 

Diletta De Cristofaro, Assistant Professor, Northumbria University, UK

"Where most ecocritical scholarship concentrates on stories set in a vulnerable future, Bartha-Mitchell’s book disrupts this temporal straight-jacketing by examining texts that – roughly arranged – examine ecological pasts, futures and presents. Cosmological Readings thus introduces readers to new ecocritical stories, to a wider range of primary texts, and challenges limited thinking about where new imaginings on the environment, ecology and climate change might be found." 

Geoff Rodoreda, Lecturer, University of Stuttgart, Germany