Rewriting Our Stories: Education, empowerment and well-being harnesses the therapeutic power of storytelling to convert feelings of fear and powerlessness into affirmative life narratives. Rather than seeing fear as an outcome, we can view it as a feeling in the moment largely governed by narratives. Many of our fears are stories we tell ourselves, even if they are largely fictional and rooted in sociocultural belief systems. The result is that we often feel helpless in the face of those fears. This transformational book considers a potent antidote: by recognising our recurring negative stories, we can rewrite and transform them to achieve greater empowerment and well-being in our lives. Storytelling is an antidote to fear. Throughout human existence, no matter where our place of origin or when in history, storytelling shapes our societies, influencing personal, sociocultural, educational, and public discourses that impact how we live. Creating and communicating the language of stories - to ourselves and others - enhances our innate voices and can empower us to engage in greater empathy, compassion, and possibility. Intended for educators, leaders, therapists, mental health professionals, change management, or youth organisations, as well as the general public, Derek Gladwin offers practical and positive tools for everyone to re-author their lives.

Ecological Exile explores how contemporary literature, film, and media culture confront ecological crises through perspectives of spatial justice - a facet of social justice that looks at unjust circumstances as a phenomenon of space. Growing instances of flooding, population displacement, and pollution suggest an urgent need to re-examine the ways social and geographical spaces are perceived and valued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Maintaining that ecological crises are largely socially produced, Derek Gladwin considers how British and Irish literary and visual texts by Ian McEwan, Sarah Gavron, Eavan Boland, John McGrath, and China Mieville, among others, respond to and confront various spatial injustices resulting from fossil fuel production and the effects of climate change. This ambitious book offers a new spatial perspective in the environmental humanities by focusing on what the philosopher Glenn Albrecht has termed 'solastalgia' - a feeling of homesickness caused by environmental damage. The result of solastalgia is that people feel paradoxically ecologically exiled in the places they continue to live because of destructive environmental changes. Gladwin skilfully traces spatially produced instances of ecological injustice that literally and imaginatively abolish people's sense of place (or place-home). By looking at two of the most pressing social and environmental concerns - oil and climate - Ecological Exile shows how literary and visual texts have documented spatially unjust effects of solastalgia. This interdisciplinary book will appeal to students, scholars, and professionals studying literary, film, and media texts that draw on environment and sustainability, cultural geography, energy cultures, climate change, and social justice.

Ecological Exile explores how contemporary literature, film, and media culture confront ecological crises through perspectives of spatial justice - a facet of social justice that looks at unjust circumstances as a phenomenon of space. Growing instances of flooding, population displacement, and pollution suggest an urgent need to re-examine the ways social and geographical spaces are perceived and valued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Maintaining that ecological crises are largely socially produced, Derek Gladwin considers how British and Irish literary and visual texts by Ian McEwan, Sarah Gavron, Eavan Boland, John McGrath, and China Mieville, among others, respond to and confront various spatial injustices resulting from fossil fuel production and the effects of climate change. This ambitious book offers a new spatial perspective in the environmental humanities by focusing on what the philosopher Glenn Albrecht has termed 'solastalgia' - a feeling of homesickness caused by environmental damage. The result of solastalgia is that people feel paradoxically ecologically exiled in the places they continue to live because of destructive environmental changes. Gladwin skilfully traces spatially produced instances of ecological injustice that literally and imaginatively abolish people's sense of place (or place-home). By looking at two of the most pressing social and environmental concerns - oil and climate - Ecological Exile shows how literary and visual texts have documented spatially unjust effects of solastalgia. This interdisciplinary book will appeal to students, scholars, and professionals studying literary, film, and media texts that draw on environment and sustainability, cultural geography, energy cultures, climate change, and social justice.

An unprecedented compilation of critical and creative essays and visual texts from leading international scholars, Unfolding Irish landscapes presents cross-disciplinary studies of the prose, cartography, visual art and cultural legacy of the award-winning work of cartographer and writer Tim Robinson. This book explores the process in which Robinson has addressed the historical and geographical tensions that suffuse the landscapes of Ireland. Robinson's distinctive methods of map-making and topographical writing capture the geographical and cultural consciousness of not only Ireland, but also of the entire North Atlantic archipelago. Through both topographic prose and cartography Robinson undertakes one of the greatest explorations of the Irish landscape by a single person in recent history, paralleling, if not surpassing, Robert Lloyd Praeger's extensive catalogue of writings and natural histories of western Ireland. -- .

An unprecedented compilation of critical and creative essays and visual texts from leading international scholars, Unfolding Irish landscapes presents cross-disciplinary studies of the prose, cartography, visual art and cultural legacy of the award-winning work of cartographer and writer Tim Robinson. This book explores the process in which Robinson has addressed the historical and geographical tensions that suffuse the landscapes of Ireland. Robinson's distinctive methods of map-making and topographical writing capture the geographical and cultural consciousness of not only Ireland, but also of the entire North Atlantic archipelago. Through both topographic prose and cartography Robinson undertakes one of the greatest explorations of the Irish landscape by a single person in recent history, paralleling, if not surpassing, Robert Lloyd Praeger's extensive catalogue of writings and natural histories of western Ireland. -- .

This book provides a political and geographical history of how boglands (or bogs) are represented in modern and contemporary Irish literature and culture (1880s-present). Drawing on a range of Irish writers, including Bram Stoker, Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain, Daniel Corkery, Seamus Heaney, Marina Carr, Deirdre Kinahan, Erin Hart, and Tim Robinson, Contentious Terrains argues that the destabilizing capacities of the bog provide a space to explore historically fraught colonial tensions and social struggles through the postcolonial Gothic form. This study shows how bogs are more than mere landforms in the Irish landscape, but a kind of narrative that reveal some of the potentially unanswered questions in Irish literary history. Cultural and literary Gothic writings featuring bogs uncover some of the underlying questions during and after colonization in Ireland, and show how they relate to the larger social process in the development of modern Irish literary history, particularly during the Land Wars of the 1880s, the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), the Troubles (1960s and 1970s), and the Celtic Tiger (1990s and 2000s).Contentious Terrains employs a cross-disciplinary scope and examines a diverse range of Irish writers in various literary genres, thus testifying to the pervasiveness and range of the bog's allure in Irish literary history and culture.

This collection introduces and examines the overarching ecological consciousness evinced in the writings of James Joyce. Reading Joyce with a keen attention to the manner in which the natural and built environment functions as context, horizon, threat, or site of liberation in Joyce's writing offers an engaging and fruitful way into the dense, demanding, and usually encyclopedic formation of knowledge that comprises Joyce's literary legacy. Scholars working within Irish studies draw on a wide variety of critical outlooks, including cultural studies, post-colonial studies, transnational studies, gender studies and, of course, modernist studies; this book will help that community become better acquainted with how ecocriticism elucidates the work of Irish writers, and will encourage further research in this direction. Even writers like Joyce, who are usually regarded as primarily urban, exhibit a strong ecological dimension in their work, and there are many other Irish writers who have produced work that directly engages issues in ecology and environmental studies. Eco-Joyce covers a multitude of disciplines in an attempt to serve as a point of entry into Joyce and ecocriticism, of course, but it will also suggest ways in which Irish studies and modernist studies could gain energy from this relatively new and vital approach.