Ecocriticism and the Island is a fascinating study of the diversity and importance of literature and life across the north Atlantic archipelago. Written with clarity and insight, it is a guide to the histories of communities around Ireland and Britain and an augur of our collective future through engagement with art, language, and climate science, all brought together in a compelling critical and creative narrative. It is an important addition to the archipelagic and blue humanities and marks a good step forward in island thinking.
— Nicholas Allen, director, Wilson Center for Humanities and Arts, University of Georgia
Drawing upon an impressive breadth of theoretical reference as well as interviews with key writers, Pippa Marland offers sensitive and illuminating close readings of a diverse range of creative non-fictional texts. The result is a brilliantly original and engagingly lucid work of ‘archipelagraphy’ that demonstrates how ecocriticism might contribute to island studies and how island-themed texts might advance ecocritical practice. Ecocriticism and the Island is essential reading for all researchers and students interested in the intersections of literature, place, and contemporary environmental thought.
— David Cooper, founding co-director of the Centre for Place Writing, Manchester Metropolitan University
Read this book if you are drawn to the ever-more-crowded bookstore shelves of creative nonfiction about place and about living in, traversing, or mapping distinctive geographies and their communities. Ecocriticism and the Island is a meticulously researched study of island-themed books by some of the most important writers on these shelves. It is a gift to researchers seeking new approaches to island literary studies, offering thorough and utterly persuasive close readings that confirm the ultimate inseparability of actual and imagined islands. It is also a gift to researchers seeking a route between the concepts and methods of island studies and of ecocriticism, two approaches that, as Pippa Marland amply demonstrates, need each other.
— Lisa Fletcher, University of Tasmania
Between 2007 and 2015, Clutag Press published the creative writing journal Archipelago. The cover art showed a drawing of the British Isles from an angle rarely displayed—with Scotland and Ireland front and centre, the southeast disappearing over the horizon. On reading the title and blurb of Ecocriticism and the Island, this image was the first that came to mind, so it is fitting that it’s mentioned by Marland in the introduction to this book, an expansion of her 2016 PhD thesis. Divided into five parts, this book uses wide ranging research, as well as personal interviews with some of the authors, to explore the ways in which island studies and ecocriticism can productively engage with each other.
— Ecozon@