Alden Nowlan's poetry of the anthropocene
Date
2025
Authors
McLauchlan, Alexander
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Abstract
My research examines the work of Canadian poet Alden Nowlan from an anthropogenic, ecocritical perspective. Though Nowlan is often painted as a regionalist, I assert that his work anticipated concerns with globalized, anthropogenic destruction of the environment that extend beyond the notion of Canadian national identity and demand that the reader engage with the damage caused to a global biosphere. My research demonstrates that various anthropogenic critical methods may be synthesized with literary adaptions of "ecotone" and "edge species" to better illustrate the global relationship between human subject and non-human object. Nowlan's work is thus revealed to provide contemporary readers a view of Anthropocene poetics avant la lettre.My research examines the work of Canadian poet Alden Nowlan from an anthropogenic, ecocritical perspective. Though Nowlan is often painted as a regionalist, I assert that his work anticipated concerns with globalized, anthropogenic destruction of the environment that extend beyond the notion of Canadian national identity and demand that the reader engage with the damage caused to a global biosphere. My research demonstrates that various anthropogenic critical methods may be synthesized with literary adaptions of "ecotone" and "edge species" to better illustrate the global relationship between human subject and non-human object. Nowlan's work is thus revealed to provide contemporary readers a view of Anthropocene poetics avant la lettre.
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Keywords
poetry, ecocriticism, anthropocene, Canadian, neoliberalism