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
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 & Humanities > 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: |
|
| 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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