Greening the Maple

Ecocriticism can be described in very general terms as the investigation of the many ways in which culture and the environment are interrelated and conceptualized. Ecocriticism aspires to understand and often to celebrate the natural world, yet it does so indirectly by focusing primarily on written texts. Hailed as one of the most timely and provocative developments in literary and cultural studies of recent decades, it has also been greeted with bewilderment or scepticism by those for whom its aims and methods are unclear. This book seeks to bring into view the development of ecocriticism in the context of Canadian literary studies. Selections include work by Margaret Atwood, Northrop Frye, Sherrill Grace, and Rosemary Sullivan.

With contributions by:
Margaret Atwood
Pamela Banting
D.M.R. Bentley
Carrie Dawson
MisaoDean
Adam Dickinson
Northrop Frye
Sherrill E. Grace
Nelson Gray
Gabriele Helms
Linda Hutcheon
Jenny Kerber
Cheryl Lousley
Travis V. Mason
Linda Morra
Heather Murray
Susie O'Brien
Stephanie Posthumus
Laurie Ricou
Elise Salaun
Catriona Sandilands
Rosemary Sullivan
Rita Wong

Table of contents
Greening the Maple	1
Series Page	3
Full Cover Page	4
Copyright Page	5
Contents	6
Acknowledgments	10
Publication Information For Republished Essays	11
Introduction: Ecocriticism Northof the Forty-ninth Parallel	14
SECTION 1: NATURE AND NATION: BEFORE AND BEYOND THEMATIC CRITICISM	56
1: Selections from The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (1971)	58
2: Selections from Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972)	68
3: La forêt or the Wilderness as Myth (1987)	86
4: Quest for the Peaceable Kingdom: Urban/Rural Codes in Roy, Laurence, and Atwood (1984)	98
5: Women in the Wilderness (1986)	116
SECTION 2: THE EMERGENCE OF ECOCRITICISM IN CANADA	138
6: “Along the Line of Smoky Hills”: Further Steps towards an Ecological Poetics (1990)	140
Front Cover	160
7: So Big about Green (1991)	164
8: So Unwise about Green (1996)	172
9: Eruptions of Postmodernity: The Postcolonial and the Ecological (1993)	178
10: Contemporary Canadian Poetry from the Edge: An Exploration of Literary Ecocriticism (1995)	200
11: Nature’s Nation, National Natures? Reading Ecocriticism in a Canadian Context (1998)	222
SECTION 3: READING CANADIAN LANDSCAPES	252
12: Nature Trafficking: Writing and Environment in the Western Canada–U.S. Borderlands	254
13: Calypso Trails: Botanizingon the Bruce Peninsula (2010)	282
14: Knowledge, Power, and Place: Environmental Politics in the Fiction of Matt Cohen and David Adams Richards (2007)	302
SECTION 4: ENVIRONMENTS AND CROSS-CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS	328
15: Canadian Art according to Emily Carr: The Search for Indigenous Expression (2005)	330
16: “Mon pays, ce n’est pasun pays, c’est l’hiver”: Literary Representations of Nature and Ecocritical Thought in Quebec	352
17: Decolonizasian: Reading Asianand First Nations Relations in Literature (2008)	384
SECTION 5: NEIGHBOURS UNKNOWN: ANIMALS IN CANADIAN LITERATURE	412
18: Selections from Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972)	414
19: Political Science: Realism in Roberts’s Animal Stories (1996)	424
20: The “I” in Beaver: Sympathetic Identification andSelf-Representation in Grey Owl’s Pilgrims of the Wild (2007)	442
21: The Ontology and Epistemology of Walking: Animality in Karsten Heuer’s Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd	462
SECTION 6: IN FULL BLOOM:NEW DIRECTIONS IN CANADIAN THEORY	492
22: Poetics of the Semiosphere: Pataphysics, Biosemiotics, and Imaginary Solutions for Water (2011)	494
23: Literature and Geology: An Experiment in Interdisciplinary, Comparative Ecocriticism	530
24: The Dwelling Perspective in English-Canadian Drama	566
Afterword: Ecocritical Futures	582
Appendix: Taking Flight: From Little Grey Birds to The Goose	586
Notes on the Contributors	602
Index	606
Back Cover	626

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