Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 12 (2022)

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, Christian Arnsperger

Issue 12 (2022) of Text Matters, titled The Ecological Future, edited by Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Christian Arnsperger of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, deals with the temporal aspect of the ecological challenge facing humanity. Time is a central category in thinking about the environment because of our focus on the planet's possible futures as well as our awareness of how quickly the climate is changing and how fast we must react if we want to prevent a catastrophe. These issues are addressed by the volume's main section, containing scholarly papers, excerpts from two books by William deBuys, a fictional narrative by John Michael Greer, a screenplay by Elizabeth Watson, and conversations with the three authors. The scholarly articles discuss the work of writers such as J. G. Ballard, Imbolo Mbue, Cherie Dimaline, Louise Erdrich, Gary Snyder, Kenneth White, Richard Powers, and M. R. Carey, as well as graphic novels, photography, painting, and cultural practices. Their main points of focus are re-flected by the titles of the five sub-sections into which they have been divided: "Tempo-rality and Deep Time," "Eco-Anxiety and Anthropocene Nostalgia," "Indigenous Pasts, Presents and Futures," "Interconnectivity and Animacy," and "Ecotopia and Eco-Futurism." The ecological futures imagined in these interventions require creating new narratives of modernity, often, as it turns out, ones inspired by Indigenous attitudes to-wards the biosphere. As the ecological is often closely linked to different approaches towards the body, the subsequent section, titled "BODY/TEXT/IMAGE," contains pa-pers discussing several works of literature as well as visual and performing arts, sharing the theme of corporeality and embodiment. The volume is concluded by a review of a scholarly volume on Shakespeare and an interview with Philip Terry.

Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 6 (2016)

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

Issue 6 of Text Matters, entitled Gothic Matters and edited by Professor Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (University of Lausanne), is a collection of essays that explore the relevance of the Gothic genre (and Gothic studies as such) in the first decades of the 21st century. Apart from the informative editorial, the main section contains thirteen scholarly texts that address topics as diverse as the reading of The Monk by M. G. Lewis and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein through the lens of the French Revolution, the EcoGothic analysis of Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes, the notion of Imperial Gothic, the filmic representations of (dismembered) hands, the Gothic in postcolonial writing in the Philippines and the American pastoral tradition, the close ties between the Gothic, globalization and economic crisis (as aptly illustrated by Cormac McCarthy's The Road, as well as two films: Take Shelter and Winter's Bone), gender and genre hybridity in the Supernatural series, vampires (in American Indian myths and in Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive), and, finally, the juxtaposition of zombies with the Big Pharma. The volume also includes three texts gathered in the section appropriately named Intersections. They discuss the images of Trebizond and the Pontos in contemporary literature in English, allusions to Henryk Sienkiewicz's short story "The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall" in "Through the Panama" by Malcolm Lowry, and liminality in Tony Harrison's poetry. The concluding section consists of three reviews (of Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, edited by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright; Charles I. Armstrong's Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History; and Anna Pochmara's The Making of the New Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance) and two interviews (with Bill Gaston and Uilleam Blacker).