Arijana Luburić Cvijanović
From Nostalgia and Despair to Action: The Hard Lessons of Eco-Fiction
From the Romanticists’ passionate outcries against industrialisation to twenty-first-century ecological nostalgia, anxiety and trauma, our future has been inscribed as brimming with potential yet threatening; but, most importantly, one in which we are all implicated. This has inspired a proliferation of ecocritical narratives across cultures and genres, and lead to the establishment of the now hugely popular and internationally important environmental humanities. As literature, art, film and environmental humanities testify to the urgency to address ecological and other related issues, my intention is to discuss a range of mostly contemporary eco-fictions that take us from nostalgia and despair to action, in an attempt to determine their, but also our, position in relation to phenomena that have become the “normal abnormal” (Craps, Crownshaw and Dolgoy).
Arijana Luburić-Cvijanović is Professor of Literature at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia. Her main research interests are postcolonial, cosmopolitan and transgressive fiction in English, but her work is also inevitably immersed in matters of culture. She has published widely on a variety of issues including but not restricted to identity, migration, space and place, gender, body, magical realism, new literary cosmopolitanism, and transgressivity in literature. Her current work has also turned to posthumanism and ecocriticism, combining them with postcolonial and cosmopolitan concerns. She is the author of Ruždi i more priča: Elementi fantastike u prozi Salmana Ruždija (2007) and Insajder/autsajder: Identitet u savremenom postkolonijalnom romanu (2018), as well as co-editor of Nova lica svetske književnosti: Eseji o postkolonijalnoj literaturi i kulturi (2012) and co-author of Out of Bounds: Transgressivity in Poetry, Drama and Fiction (2023). Her articles have appeared, among others, in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, Contemporary Women's Writing, Književna istorija, Kultura, Teme and Nasleđe.