Discovering Francophone Ecoregions of the Long Nineteenth Century

Daniel A. Finch-Race, Valentina Gosetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781041243762
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040986066
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This book examines how texts and visual culture from nineteenth-century French-speaking contexts can enhance understanding of twenty-first-century challenges. It takes up an ecoregional paradigm at the crossroads of natural sciences and social sciences to evaluate the interplay between local experiences and global concerns about ecological disruptions tied to modernization. Contributors' close readings make use of decentring methods to probe binaries such as canonical versus marginal. This diverse thinking is relevant to literary geography, social history, and the environmental humanities. The chapters herein were originally published as a special issue of Dix-neuf.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Environment and Identity in the Nineteenth-Century French Caribbean Novel: Traversay's Les amours de Zémédare et Carina and Bergeaud's Stella
• Alpine Ecology in Stendhal's Mémoires d'un touriste
• Against Nature? Vigny's Stones
• Celtic Environments: Welsh Industrial Landscapes through French Travelogues
• Natura Magistra Vitae: Natural Pedagogy in Élisée Reclus's Histoire D'un Ruisseau
• Progressive Waters: Memory, Narrative and Localism in Émile Zola's L'inondation
• Gleaning the Tideline: Elodie La Villette's Ecocritical Painting
• Text, Topos, and the Awareness of History in Frédéric Mistral's Poème du Rhône
• L'écorégionalisme et le ‘sauvage': De la figure du māhū à ‘L'après-midi d'un faune' de Paul Gauguin
• Afterword: Ecocriticism in the Age of Dislocation?
• Index