O'Neill, Stephen (2023) Arborealities, or Making Trees Matter in Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE). pp. 1-21. ISSN 1076-0962

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Abstract

Shafak’s Island of Missing Trees (2021) is a vital contribution to the imaginative work the Anthropocene demands. Focalising its narrative through a talking fig tree that witnesses nature’s suffering and the trauma of a partitioned Cyprus, the novel unfolds a deeply ethical arboreal aesthetic, or arborealities, in which a literary text generates a language of trees such that we come to regard the tree as a subject with agency and sentience. Attending to the novel form’s world-making capacities, and its arboreal intertexts including Ovid, I argue that it releases new epistemologies and ontologies that help us recognise trees as kinfolk.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Arborealities; Making Trees Matter; Elif Shafak; The Island; Missing Trees;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Arts,Celtic Studies and Philosophy > School of English, Media & Theatre Studies > English
Item ID:	17390
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isad040
Depositing User:	Stephen O'Neill
Date Deposited:	10 Jul 2023 12:03
Journal or Publication Title:	Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE)
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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