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Chapter 14 - Ice/Water/Vapor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2021

By
Steve Mentz
Edited by
Jeffrey Cohen  and
Stephanie Foote
Jeffrey Cohen
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
Stephanie Foote
Affiliation:
West Virginia University
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Summary

The most common physical substance on our planet, water touches and shapes human lives, cultures, and histories in all three of its physical states: solid ice, liquid water, and gaseous vapor. Environmental humanities scholarship has focused largely on oceans and large bodies of fresh water. A wider frame for water-focused ecological scholarship should also include gaseous vapor, solid ice, and other less visible forms that water takes on our planet. Engaging in turn with each of the physical phases in which humans encounter water, and distinguishing between salt and fresh liquid water, this chapter demonstrates the range and dynamism of the relationship between humans and this essential substance. The invisible touch of humidity, the glacial immensity of polar ice, the sweetness of fresh water, and the imaginative breadth of the great salt sea all provide matter for environmental analysis. The chapter contains accounts of recent water-focused writings in the environmental humanities, presents a brief literary history of water in its various shapes, and concludes by gesturing toward the possibilities for new work.

Keywords

Blue humanitiesoceanic studiesSouthern studiesAnthropocenecoastal history
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities , pp. 185 - 198
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Alaimo, Stacy, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Baker, Samuel, Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Blum, Hester, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Brayton, Dan, Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Carroll, Siobhan, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Spaces in the British Imagination, 1750–1850. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Cohen, Margaret, The Novel and the Sea. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duckert, Lowell, For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Waterscapes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Ingersoll, Karin Animoto, Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Mentz, Steve, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neimanis, Astrida, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.Google Scholar

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