Imagined Topographies—From Colonial Resource to Postcolonial Homeland

Highfield (English, Rhode Island School of Design) explores literary and artistic representations of threatened landscapes in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Over the course of three chapters individually focused on the Irish bog, the Amazonian rainforest, and the Australian outback, he examines how topographical representations have helped shape the culture and outside perception of each region. Examples of works discussed include the poems of Seamus Heaney, John Dunne's novel Purtock, the poetry of Ciaran Carson, the Guyanese epics of Wilson Harris, Karen Tei Yamashita's novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest, David Malouf's novels Remembering Babylon and Conversatinos at Curlow Creek, and the Australian Aboriginal language film Ten Canoes. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Jonathan Bishop Highfield, Professor of English at Rhode Island School of Design, received his PhD from the University of Iowa. His work on postcolonial ecocriticism has appeared as chapters in Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa (2011), Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives (2010), Trauma, Resistance, Reconstruction in Post-1994 South African Writing (2010), and Fact and Fiction (2008). He has published essays in Antipodes, Atlantic Studies, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, The International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability, The Jonestown Report, Kunapipi, Passages, and Rupkatha. He is also the co-editor (with Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang and Dora Edu Buandoh) of The State of the Art(s): African Studies and American Studies in Comparative Perspective (2006).