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  • Shakespeare’s Ecology of Natural Resources: Transitions and Transformations

    Shakespeare’s Ecology of Natural Resources by Chiari, Sophie;

    Transitions and Transformations

      • GET 13% OFF

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      • Publisher's listprice GBP 80.00
      • The price is estimated because at the time of ordering we do not know what conversion rates will apply to HUF / product currency when the book arrives. In case HUF is weaker, the price increases slightly, in case HUF is stronger, the price goes lower slightly.

        38 220 Ft (36 400 Ft + 5% VAT)
      • Discount 13% (cc. 4 969 Ft off)
      • Discounted price 33 251 Ft (31 668 Ft + 5% VAT)

    38 220 Ft

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    Product details:

    • Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)
    • Date of Publication 11 December 2025
    • Number of Volumes Hardback

    • ISBN 9781350559066
    • Binding Hardback
    • No. of pages248 pages
    • Size 234x156 mm
    • Language English
    • 700

    Categories

    Short description:

    This book analyses the way Shakespeare presents the transformation of the early modern natural world through the exploitation of natural resources in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

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    Long description:

    Sophie Chiari analyses how Shakespeare's plays and poems present the transformation of the early modern natural world through environmental shifts and ecological transformation.

    Using a range of examples from the Sonnets, Love's Labour's Lost, The Tempest, Hamlet and Henry V, Chiari's ecopoetic study of dramatic language explores Shakespeare's response to the rise of extractive exploitation in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Chiari expands our understanding of the environment in Shakespeare beyond the so-called 'green' comedies by charting the transition from a pre-capitalist world towards a commodity-based society ruined by the enclosure of the commons. Using examples of water systems, sandscapes, soil and frost alongside the production of glass and salt in Shakespeare, these materials which are currently underrepresented in Shakespearean ecocriticism signal a commitment to expanding the 'material turn' in Shakespeare studies. Far from being limited to the present era, this book argues that cultural hegemony and the exploitation of soil, water and ice were increasingly linked in the early modern era, an age of conquest and massive human depredation. By interweaving ecohistoricism, ecopoetics and material studies Shakespeare's Ecology of Natural Resources shows how an eco-minded approach, focused on the interweaving of trade, territory and extractivism reveals new layers of meaning in Shakespearean poetics and drama.

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    Table of Contents:

    Acknowledgements

    Introduction: Shakespearean Spaces of Production in the Anthropocene

    Chapter 1: The Fabric of Life in the Sonnets
    Good husbandry
    Black pastoralism
    Nature's agency
    Overgreening the Sonnets

    Chapter 2: Crossing the Nature/Culture Divide in Love's Labour's Lost
    A locus of empowerment
    The commodification of Navarre's green world
    Imperialism in the King's estate
    A cultural nature

    Chapter 3: Water Industry and Riverine Collapse
    An instrumentalist approach to rivers
    Fresh water control and diversion
    Ditches and drainage issues
    Fluid dynamics in Shakespeare

    Chapter 4: From Early Modern Sandscapes to the Making of Glass
    Early modern sandscapes
    Transience and mutability
    The materiality of sand
    From materiality to 'bare life'

    Chapter 5: Under-ground Shakespeare: Transgressing the Limits and Foraging the Earth
    The figure of the collier
    Coal dependency: after wood, mineral fuel
    Extraction economy: wresting resources from nature
    Conflict landscapes: a wounded earth
    At the heart of darkness

    Chapter 6: Plotting, Digging, Burying, or Soil Issues in Hamlet
    Land possession
    Decay and degeneration
    Subterranean passages
    Searching for inwardness

    Chapter 7: Business in the Frost in The Tempest
    The island's double climate
    Land use
    Imperialism and extraction
    Extracting. and burying

    Chapter 8: White Ecology: The Salt of Early Modern Life
    Salt-making
    Seasoning and preserving
    An imperial commodity
    Preservation and destruction: from natural to commodified white gold

    Conclusion: Transforming Nature: Life in a Crisis Mode

    Bibliography

    Index

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