Words on Water

Words on Water presents a unique combination of international and interdisciplinary approaches to global and local water issues. The contributions attest to the productivity of ecocriticism's analyses of literary and cultural representations form a variety of perspectives, illuminating the enormous and multifaceted significance of water in literature, art, and film, as a daily commodity and as part of spiritualism, in the USA, in Canada and in Europe as well as in India and Australia. They demonstrate the imbrication of nature and culture, or, more specifically, how water as an autonomous, active force affects human culture, and how, on the other hand, cultural ideologies and processes try to tame, to instrumentalize and to define a natural element, albeit often with disastrous results. The contributions are an important step in highligthing the global significance of water, in appreciating its material quality and in revealing the consequences of its cultural appropriations.