Blue Extinction in Literature, Art, and Culture

Blue Extinction in Literature, Culture, and Art examines literary and cultural representations of aquatic biodiversity loss, bringing together critical perspectives from the blue humanities and extinction studies. It demonstrates the affordances, as well as the limitations, of literary and artistic forms in exposing the plight of aquatic organisms, drawing attention to the social, political, and economic structures that are contributing to their destruction. Together, the essays in this collection demonstrate how literature and art can challenge dominant cultural conceptions and lingering misconceptions surrounding aquatic biodiversity loss, offering new ways of relating to species ranging from whales to oysters Vera Fibisan is Honorary Researcher at the University of Sheffield, UK, where she completed a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing. Her research interests include ecopoetics, extinction studies, posthumanism, hydrofeminism, and contemporary literature. She is the editor of the creative writing journal Route57. She is also the ASLE-UKI Postgraduate and Early-Career Representative and co-hosts the ASLE-UKI podcast Green Listening: Discussions in Ecocriticism. Her recent poetry focuses on aquatic extinction. Rachel Murray is Lecturer in Literature and the Environment at University of Bristol, UK. She specializes in twentieth-century literature, animal studies, and the environment. She is the author of The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form (2020) and is the editor (with Caroline Hovanec) of “Reading Modernism in the Sixth Extinction” for Modernism/modernity. She has published articles in the Journal of Modern Literature, Humanities, and the Journal of Literature and Science, among other venues. She is currently writing a book about marine life in modern and contemporary poetry, provisionally entitled Marine Attachments.