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This book explores how contemporary Australian ecofiction interrogates and challenges settler-colonial conceptions of nature and the nonhuman through a close-reading of nine Australian eco-novels. Fetherston's reading reveals the representation of the nonhuman in different contexts and the ability of fiction to destabilise settler claims on Australian land and the nonhuman. Texts covered include a combination of texts by First Nations authors, non-Indigenous Anglo-Celtic Australian authors writing within a settler-colonial literary tradition, and non-Indigenous Australian authors whose novels reflect diasporic literary practices. Fetherston argues that Australian ecofiction authors have established over the last decade a postcolonising eco-literary framework that connects the concepts of nonhuman agency and more-than human relationality with the notion of unsettlement, or unsettled belonging, in the context of the climate crisis.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Unsettling Ecocriticism.- Chapter 2: The Nonhuman and the Postcolonial Eco-novel.- Chapter 3: Border Transgressions and Human-animal Relations.- Chapter 4: Collaborative Storytelling and Un/Belonging in the Australian Habitat Story.- Chapter 5:Unstable Ground and the Abiotic Nonhuman in the Regional Australian Novel.- Chapter 6:Bushfire, Drought and Settler-colonial Culpability in the Eco-crime Novel.- Chapter 7:Historical Ecofiction and the Agency of Water.- Chapter 8:Conclusion: Eco-Literary Futures.
About the author
Rachel Fetherston is a Lecturer in Literary Studies in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia.
Summary
This book explores how contemporary Australian ecofiction interrogates and challenges settler-colonial conceptions of nature and the nonhuman through a close-reading of nine Australian eco-novels. Fetherston's reading reveals the representation of the nonhuman in different contexts and the ability of fiction to destabilise settler claims on Australian land and the nonhuman. Texts covered include a combination of texts by First Nations authors, non-Indigenous Anglo-Celtic Australian authors writing within a settler-colonial literary tradition, and non-Indigenous Australian authors whose novels reflect diasporic literary practices. Fetherston argues that Australian ecofiction authors have established over the last decade a postcolonising eco-literary framework that connects the concepts of nonhuman agency and more-than human relationality with the notion of unsettlement, or unsettled belonging, in the context of the climate crisis.
