Authors:
- Offers a bold and compelling alternative to reading literature and art through the lens of wonder and not critique
- Opens up wonder not as a theoretical approach but instead a vital mode of thought for educational, interdisciplinary, and environmental purposes
- Discusses an abundance of source material stretching from ancient philosophy through twentieth-century literature and arts including King Kong, Life of Pi, and the works of Edgar Allan Poe
Part of the book series: Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment (LCE)
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Table of contents (5 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
In a world awash in awesome, sensual technological experiences, wonder has diverse powers, including awakening us to unexpected ecological intimacies and entanglements. Yet this deeply felt experience—at once cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical—has been dangerously neglected in our cultural education. In order to cultivate the imaginative empathy and caution this feeling evokes, we need to teach ourselves and others to read for wonder. This book begins by unfolding the nature and artifice of wonder as a human capacity and as a fabricated experience. Ranging across poetry, foodstuffs, movies, tropical islands, wonder cabinets, apes, abstract painting, penguins and more, Reading for Wonder offers an anatomy of wonder in transmedia poetics, then explores its ethical power and political risks from early modern times to the present day. To save ourselves and the teeming life of our planet, indeed to flourish, we must liberate wonder from ideologies of enchantment and disenchantment, understand its workings and their ethical ambivalence, and give it a clear language and voice.
Keywords
- modernity and disenchantment
- ethics of wonder
- literary aesthetics
- Aristotle's Poetics
- poetics of wonder
- Greek drama
- Surrealist painting
- pulp fiction
- Weird Tales
- art as resistance to consumerism
- art as subversion
- wonder and ethics
- Life of Pi
- King Kong
- William Blake
- Luce Irigaray
- Ecology and literature
- Alice in Wonderland
- Rachel Carson
- Literature and social change
Authors and Affiliations
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Department of English, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada
Glenn Willmott
About the author
Glenn Willmott is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Queen’s University in Canada. His work pursues ecological and economic messages in modern literatures and the poetics of comics. Recent books are Modernist Goods: Primitivism, the Market, and the Gift (2008) and Modern Animalism: Habitats of Scarcity and Wealth in Comics and Literature (2012).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Reading for Wonder
Book Subtitle: Ecology, Ethics, Enchantment
Authors: Glenn Willmott
Series Title: Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70040-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-70039-7Published: 25 January 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-88880-4Published: 06 June 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-70040-3Published: 13 December 2017
Series ISSN: 2946-3157
Series E-ISSN: 2946-3165
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 226
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: Literary Theory, Comparative Literature, Aesthetics, Poetry and Poetics