So, you are ready to co-exist with a snake. At last! No more niggling discomfort with those images of a snake under the foot of a woman under the hand of a man-god. Instead, you are helping make the oppression of others …
This essay offers an evisceration of my troubled links to ‘cattle country’, seeking a truth-telling that responds to my mother’s romancing. I trace my family’s part in the cattle industry imposed upon Jiman Country and Wulli Wulli Country, drawing on stories populated …
This work is a case of a worlding with every wording, where material textuality creates a poetic space for thick description that helps me see the world as textual material. A thing, the blue case, with a bare handle on itself, offers…
Farming must fundamentally change over the next ten years, if humans are to flourish for future generations. Our species, like most other species in this world, thrive with nourishing food, fresh air and unpolluted water. For many decades, intensive farming has been …
Ideas of human superiority are embedded in the cultural model of dominion that patterns most human societies at this historical moment. This limited anthropocentric thinking has been instrumental in brutal injustices against animals of all species, humans included, especially over the past …
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is set in 1801, but was written in the rapidly industrialising northern England of the mid-nineteenth century. Over the ensuing one hundred and fifty years this memorable novel has garnered hundreds of adaptations. Most of these retell the …
The concept of sublime metamorphosis, considered here through affects ascribed to fictional characters, radically revises the aesthetic of the Romantic sublime, and the aspects of this literary perspective that have evolved into the postmodern sublime. Sublime metamorphosis is activated when protagonists pause …
At many points in Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë questions the inequity between humans and other animals, both by linking physical cruelty to other forms of oppression, and by depicting such oppressions as unacceptable, be they enacted against humans or nonhumans. In …
This essay is part of an ongoing effort to strengthen my material affinity with snakes. By working through my all-too-human physical engagement with these creatures, turning to literature to re-imagine the ways that I see the snakes in my life, I aim…
A readerly aesthetic of ecological consciousness, outlined in recent ecocritical scholarship, has led me to connect a number of Emily Brontë’s poems (from an oeuvre created between 1835 and 1848) to the swooping turns in Alexis Wright’s third and latest novel The …
