French Ecocriticism ─ From the Early Modern Period to the Twenty-first Century

This book expounds fruitful ways of analysing matters of ecology, environments, nature, and the non-human world in a broad spectrum of material in French. Scholars from Canada, France, Great Britain, Spain, and the United States examine the work of writers and thinkers including Michel de Montaigne, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Arthur Rimbaud, Marguerite Yourcenar, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Serres, Michel Houellebecq, and Éric Chevillard. The diverse approaches in the volume signal a common desire to bring together form and content, politics and aesthetics, theory and practice, under the aegis of the environmental humanities.

Daniel Finch-Race is undertaking a Teaching Fellowship at the University of Southampton after completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge. His primary research entails ecocritical interpretations of nineteenth-century poetry in French and Italian. His publications include a co-edited volume about textures in French contexts, a co-edited issue about ecopoetics in nineteenth-century France, and articles about Baudelaire, Dante, Rimbaud, Tennyson, and Verlaine.

Stephanie Posthumus is Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. Working in the field of contemporary French literature, she has published numerous articles on philosophies of nature and ecology, and on representations of landscapes, environments and non-human animals.