“Time Has Caught on Fire:” Eco-Anxiety  and Anger in Selected Australian Poetry

Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik

doi:10.18778/1641-4233.26.08

Authors

Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik University of Lodz, Faculty of International and Political Studies, Department of British and Commonwealth Studies https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7606-7127

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1641-4233.26.08

Keywords:

emotions in Australian literature, solastalgia, metaphors of anger, Anthropocene, Australian wildfires, trauma

Abstract

This essay discusses fire as a significant factor shaping Australian social and cultural life. It focuses first on the climate-change induced emotions such as eco-anxiety and anger that can be tied with the Australian landscape, and then moves on to a discussion of the presence and function of fire in selected contemporary Australian poetry. The reflection on the poetics of trauma in the second part of the essay is accompanied by a discussion of solastalgia connected with land dispossession as an experience of the First Nations expressed in the Aboriginal literature in English.

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Author Biography

Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik, University of Lodz, Faculty of International and Political Studies, Department of British and Commonwealth Studies

Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik – PhD, Assistant Professor at the Department of the British and Commonwealth Studies at the Faculty of International and Political Studies, University of Lodz, where she teaches literary and cultural studies, serves as the academic secretary of International Studies: Interdisciplinary Political and Cultural Journal and works at the International Shakespeare Centre. She has received numerous grants and awards for her research on Shakespeare in Poland and cultural history of emotions (Polish Science Foundation, National Science Centre, National Centre for Research and Development, Ministry of Higher Education). Dr Kowalcze-Pawlik is a board member of the Polish Shakespeare Society, where he has been serving as the vice president since 2018. She is also an active member of BSA, SAA, ESRA, ISA, as well as RSA.

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