Abstract
In entitling her book Speaking for Nature, Sylvia Bowerbank underlined the role in language in our engagement with nature, for indeed, as she wrote, “to speak in the name of nature is to speak powerfully.”1 Bowerbank’s shifting our attention to women’s speech was a key strategy in advancing ecofeminism, but it begs another set of questions: what does it mean to “speak for” something? Is that the same as speaking “in the name” of nature? And why “speaking” at all?
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Notes
Sylvia Bowerbank, Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 3.
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1980), 2.
Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Yrjo Haila and Chuck Dyke, eds, How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 2.
Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
John Milton, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Signet, 1968).
Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, and Douglas D. Heath. 14 vols. (London, 1859), Vol. 4: 29.
Phyllis Rackin, Shakespeare and Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 19.
Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 7.
Desiderius Erasmus, Depueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis, ed Jean-Claude Margolin, in Opera Omnia (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1971), 39. Translation my own.
See Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), Chapter 4.
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© 2011 Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche
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Bushnell, R. (2011). Afterword. In: Munroe, J., Laroche, R. (eds) Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001900_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001900_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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