1st Edition
The Shifting Sands of the North Sea Lowlands Literary and Historical Imaginaries
Introduction. On the Edge of the North Sea 1. Against the Tide: Living with the North Sea 2. Conquest and Control: Engineering the Anthropocene on the North Sea 3. A Sense of Place in the Anthropocene: W.G. Sebald and East Anglia 4. Landscape as Palimpsest: East Anglia in British "New Nature Writing" 5. Causeways to the Past: Anthropocene and Memory in Contemporary Novels 6. Under the North Sea: Petrospectral Futures Conclusion. The Literary Imagination in the Environmental Humanities
Biography
Katie Ritson is Managing Editor at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich.
"In evocative and moving prose, The Shifting Sands of the North Sea Lowlands takes us down rivers and along coasts, through mudflats, silt, and fenlands, to explore the remarkable littoral landscapes and literary imaginations of the North Sea Lowlands. In Ritson’s reading, these ever changing places and the diverse texts they have animated and inspired offer up an incredible richness of possibilities both for understanding our pasts and for crafting shared futures in this Anthropocene epoch." — Thom van Dooren, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies and Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney, Australia
"Where does the Anthropocene tell its stories? And who are the storytellers? With the skill of a novelist and cutting-edge trans-disciplinary methodology, Katie Ritson finds the answers to these questions in the eloquent landscapes of the North Sea Lowlands, where sands and waters, nature and history, human creativity and ecological predicaments merge into one another. Vis-à-vis with the combined imagination of elements and literature, The Shifting Sands of the North Sea Lowlands is one of the best examples of how the environmental humanities can contribute to shaping the generous imaginaries we need in a time of shifting horizons." — Serenella Iovino, co-editor of Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene and Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecology
"Bringing together both environmental history and ecocriticism, The Shifting Sands is an example of the best kind of environmental humanities scholarship, steeped in both disciplines and traditions." - Astrid Bracke, HAN University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands
