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Ecological Echoing: Following the Footsteps

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Abstract

Freedman’s essay argues that the best way to access, assess, and applaud much of the new eco-experiential, ecocritical work—such as Tom Montgomery Fate’s Cabin Fever and Ian Marshall’s Storyline: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail or Walden by Haiku—is for the critic to adopt a place-based, experiential, personal, ecological approach herself. This essay enacts these ideas, sauntering, to explain and further explore the use of personal criticism in literature of the environment and place it in the context of the broader rise of personal criticism since the 1980s. The traditional abstract included here is merely a content teaser and, we hope, reads ironically against the innovative critical work that follows. If you wish to read more about the process by which this author undertook writing this essay, as well as the critical stakes of its production, please see the introduction to the volume as well as the accompanying anti-abstract at the close of the chapter.

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Freedman, D.P. (2017). Ecological Echoing: Following the Footsteps. In: Silbergleid, R., Quynn, K. (eds) Reading and Writing Experimental Texts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58362-4_2

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