Early Modern Écologies: Beyond English Ecocriticism (original) (raw)

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. It is difficult to pin down exactly whom to acknowledge for their help in writing this book since so many diverse conversations led to its existence, but we would like to start by thanking Louisa Mackenzie for setting out, in a single question at the MLA convention, the general line of thought explored in this book. We offer hearty thanks to our contributors for being part of this laboratory of early modern French écologies-it is our hope that it will continue to foster productive entanglements between the many nonhuman keywords and quite human persons that interact throughout. We are delighted that this volume appears in the AUP series Environmental Humanities in Pre-modern Cultures, and we thank the series editors (especially Steve Mentz) for their warm welcome. We thank Erika Gaffney for her care and professionalism in ushering this project from its early stages to this final product. Melanie Hackney and Aileen Christensen provided editing and formatting, for which we are grateful. We thank Goldschmied & Chiari (Sara and Eleonora) for granting us the permission to use their beautiful work Nympheas for our cover art, and we thank Diane Brown for suggesting that their art may resonate with our project. Pauline Goul would like to thank Karen Pinkus for introducing her to (for lack of a better word) ecocriticism, Kathleen Long for her constant support, and Phillip John Usher for taking on this collaborative effort and generally being an ideal early modern écological companion, in more ways than one. Pablo García-Piñar should always be acknowledged, although listing why would require another book. Phillip John Usher expresses his gratitude to Pauline Goul for her immediate excitement about this project and her dedication to seeing it into print. He dedicates his part of the volume to Chloé Juniper Usher, who joined this world as the book came together, giving it a whole new urgency and depth. 1 The vanishing point of Mackenzie's MLA talk-and, arguably, of the present volume-is her article, 'It's a Queer Thing: Early Modern French Ecocriticism', which makes a resounding and articulate call for putting early modern French literature into dialogue with questions of ecology.

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