Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture : Biology and the Bildungsroman

Calling for a new direction for ecocriticism that integrates ideas from the study of other animal cultures with those of cultural and critical theory, Helena Feder makes a timely intervention in the constructions of nature and culture by taking a fresh look at the stories humanism explicitly tells about itself. These stories fall into the genre of the Bildungsroman, the tale of the individual's coming into culture that also participates in the myth of culture's complete separation from and opposition to nature which, Feder argues, is culture's own origin story.Moving from Voltaire's Candide to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and from Virginia Woolf's Orlando to Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, Feder dramatizes Western culture's own awareness of the instability of the binary of nature and culture. She draws on works by Frans de Waal, Kevin Laland, and other biologists to create an interdisciplinary, dialectical notion of culture in ecocritical analysis. 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 nature which, Feder argues, is culture's own origin story. Moving from Voltaire's Candide to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and from Virginia Woolf's Orlando to Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, the book dramatizes humanism's own awareness of the fallacy of this foundational binary. In the final chapters, Feder examines the discourse of animality at work in this narrative as a humanist fantasy about empathy, one that paradoxically excludes other animals from the ethical community to justify the continued domination of both human and nonhuman others. 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