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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: | 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 |
| Related URLs: | |
| URI: | https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/eprint/17390 |
| 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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