Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture - 9781409401575

Taylor & Francis

Arguing that the Bildungsroman is humanist culture's own origin story, Feder draws on the work of biologists in her examination of works by Voltaire, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf and Jamaica Kincaid. She dramatizes Western culture's own awareness of the instability of the binary of nature and culture, making a timely intervention in the ongoing culture-nature debate, bridging the gap between cultural theory and biologically grounded research. > Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture: Biology and the Bildungsroman draws on work by Kinji Imanishi, Frans de Waal, and other biologists to create an interdisciplinary, materialist notion of culture for ecocritical analysis. In this timely intervention, Feder examines the humanist idea of culture by taking a fresh look at the stories it explicitly tells about itself. These stories fall into the genre of the Bildungsroman, the tale of individual acculturation that participates in the myth of its complete separation from and opposition to nat.