This volume traces the interconnections between myth, environmentalism, narrative, poetry, comics and innovative artistic practice, using this as a framework through which to examine strategies for repairing our unhealthy relationship with the planet. Challenging late capitalist modes encouraging mindless consumption and the degradation of human-nature relations, this collection advocates a re-evaluation of the ethical relation to "living with" and sharing the earth. Myth and the environment have shared a rich common cultural history travelling as far back as the times of storytelling and legend, with the environment often the central theme. Following a robust introduction, the book is organised into three main sections: Myth, Disaster and Present-Day Views on Ecological Damage; Indigenous and Afro-Diasporic Myths and Ecological Knowledge; Art Practices Myth and Environmental Resilience; and concludes with a Coda from Jeanette Hart-Mann. The methodology draws from diverse perspectives, such as ecocriticism, new materialism and Anthropocene studies, offering a truly interdisciplinary discussion that reflects on the dialogue among environment and myth, whilst a broad range of contributions are included from Canada, United States, the Caribbean, Ukraine, Japan, Morocco, and Brazil. This volume will be of interest for students, scholars, activists and experts in environmental humanities, myth and myth criticism, literature and art on more-than human and nature interaction, ecocriticism, environmental activism, and climate change.

This volume traces the interconnections between myth, environmentalism, narrative, poetry, comics and innovative artistic practice, using this as a framework through which to examine strategies for repairing our unhealthy relationship with the planet. Challenging late capitalist modes encouraging mindless consumption and the degradation of human-nature relations, this collection advocates a re-evaluation of the ethical relation to "living with" and sharing the earth. Myth and the environment have shared a rich common cultural history travelling as far back as the times of storytelling and legend, with the environment often the central theme. Following a robust introduction, the book is organised into three main sections: Myth, Disaster and Present-Day Views on Ecological Damage; Indigenous and Afro-Diasporic Myths and Ecological Knowledge; Art Practices Myth and Environmental Resilience; and concludes with a Coda from Jeanette Hart-Mann. The methodology draws from diverse perspectives, such as ecocriticism, new materialism and Anthropocene studies, offering a truly interdisciplinary discussion that reflects on the dialogue among environment and myth, whilst a broad range of contributions are included from Canada, United States, the Caribbean, Ukraine, Japan, Morocco, and Brazil. This volume will be of interest for students, scholars, activists and experts in environmental humanities, myth and myth criticism, literature and art on more-than human and nature interaction, ecocriticism, environmental activism, and climate change.

"Cultures of the Death Drive" is a comprehensive guide to the work of pioneering psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882-1960) and to developments in Kleinian theory to date. It is also an analysis and a demonstration of the distinctive usefulness of Klein's thought for understanding modernist literature and visual art. Esther Sanchez-Pardo examines the issues that the seminal discourses of psychoanalysis and artistic modernism brought to the fore in the early twentieth century and points toward the uses of Kleinian thinking for reconceptualizing the complexities of identity and social relations today.

Sanchez-Pardo argues that the troubled political atmosphere leading to both world wars created a melancholia fueled by "cultures of the death drive" and the related specters of object loss--loss of coherent and autonomous selves, of social orders where stability reigned, of metaphysical guarantees, and, in some cases, loss and fragmentation of empire. This melancholia permeated, and even propelled, modernist artistic discourses. Sanchez-Pardo shows how the work of Melanie Klein, the theorist of melancholia par excellence, uniquely illuminates modernist texts, particularly their representations of gender and sexualities. She offers a number of readings--of works by Virginia Woolf, Rene Magritte, Lytton Strachey, Djuna Barnes, and Countee Cullen--that reveal the problems melancholia posed for verbal and visual communication and the narrative and rhetorical strategies modernist artists derived to either express or overcome them. In her afterword, Sanchez-Pardo explicates the connections between modernist and contemporary melancholia.

A valuable contribution to psychoanalytic theory, gender and sexuality studies, and the study of representation in literature and the visual arts, "Cultures of the Death Drive "is a necessary resource for those interested in the work of Melanie Klein.