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Heide Estes deposited Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes: Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination in the group
LLC Middle English on MLA Commons 5 years, 8 months ago
Literary scholars have traditionally understood landscapes, whether natural or manmade, as metaphors for humanity instead of concrete settings for people’s actions. This book accepts the natural world as such by investigating how Anglo-Saxons interacted with and conceived of their lived environments. Examining Old English poems such as Beowulf and Judith, as well as descriptions of natural events from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other documentary texts from perspectives including ecofeminism and post-colonial ecocriticism, this book shows that Anglo-Saxon ideologies which view nature as diametrically opposed to humans, and the natural world as designed for human use, have become deeply embedded in our cultural heritage, language, and more.