The Environmental Imaginary in Brazilian Poetry and Art

This study contributes to ongoing discussions on the connections between the environmental imaginary and issues of identity, place and nation. Utilizing a delimited ecocritical approach, McNee puts Brazilian culture, through the work of contemporary poets and visual artists, into a broader, transnational dialogue.

“The core chapters will certainly serve as useful critical companions to graduate and undergraduate courses on literature, visual art, and landscape seeking a diversity of global perspectives. … The Environmental Imaginary also makes an important contribution to the burgeoning field of the environmental humanities by questioning the very terms in which current debates over development, climate change, and the value of the human and the more-than-human are carried out.” (Darien Lamen, Luso-Brazilian Revie, Vol. 53 (2), Winter, 2016)

"In this smart interdisciplinary treatment of ecopoetics, Malcolm McNee's The Environmental Imaginary in Brazilian Poetry and Art uses ecocritical theory to build bridges between the most recent developments in Environmental Humanities and the cultural and bioregional contexts of Brazil as well as between the literary and visual arts. Unlike the many primarily political treatments of the theme of nature in Latin American literature, McNee allows contemporary understandings of ecology to inspire a rethinking of older postcolonial paradigms. It will be of great value to ecocritics and, no doubt, to the budding conversation in Brazil about literature and the environment." - George Handley, Professor of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature, Brigham Young University, USA

"Just as Brazil is one of the most prominent green sites on the planet, Malcolm K. McNee, with his unique study, is poised to be an authoritative voice in ecocriticism of contemporary Brazilian poetry and visual arts. What he sees and hears reverberates throughout the hemisphere and around the world." - Charles A. Perrone, Professor of Spanish & Portuguese Studies, University of Florida, USA, and author of Seven Faces, Brazilian Poetry since Modernism and Brazil, Lyric, and the Americas

"In this seminal and sensitive study of contemporary poetry and visual arts from Brazil, Malcolm McNee expands our understanding not only of the Environmental Imaginary, but also of the aesthetical, historical, and philosophical challenges of our time. Through a careful and delicate analysis of the work of four poets, Manoel de Barros, Astrid Cabral, Sérgio Medeiros and Josely Vianna Baptista, and four artists, Frans Krajcberg, Bené Fonteles, Lia do Rio, and Nuno Ramos, McNee's book brings a fresh air and a renewed approach to literary studies, attuned with the most contemporary reflections on ethno-anthropology, and ecocriticsm." - Marília Librandi-Rocha, Assistant Professor of Brazilian Literature and Culture, Stanford University, USA

Malcolm K. McNee is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Smith College, USA.