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This unique edited collection of scholarly articles brings together the work of a diverse range of literary and cultural critics, creative writers, and environmental and social activists. It marks an important contribution to the fields of Caribbean Studies, postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism. Through its deployment of the concept of world-ecology, the volume intervenes in two of the most vital areas of investigation in current literary studies. On the one hand, it represents an engagement with the field of world literature, around which there has been an upsurge in debate over the past decade or so. On the other, it responds to new developments in the field of environmental humanities, which derive their urgency from concerns over the planetary ecosystem. The collection provides an original and comprehensive perspective on the imbrication of the history of environmental transformations, political struggles, and literary production in the Caribbean. The book responds to the need for an engaged, pan-Caribbean-oriented investigation into the relationship between aesthetics and ecology, one capable of situating the analysis of cultural production within the specific contexts of local environmental concerns and struggles. The essays in this collection provide an unparalleled insight into how particular ecological processes and pressure-points in the Caribbean region – from ‘natural’ disasters such as hurricanes to the impact of neoliberal structural adjustment policies – have imprinted themselves on literary form.

This book investigates an emergent and increasingly important field of cultural production in Latin America: cyberliterature and cyberculture in their varying manifestations, including blogs and hypertext narratives, collective novels and e-mags, digital art and short Net-films. It provides a sustained academic focus on this area of cultural production, and investigates the ways in which cyberliterature and cyberculture in the broadest sense are providing new configurations of subjects, narrative voices and even political agency, for Latin Americans. The volume is divided into two main sections. The first comprises eight chapters on the broad area of cyberculture and identity formation/preservation including the development of different types of cybercommunity in Latin America. While many of the chapters applaud the creative potential of these new virtual communities, identities and cultural products to create networks across boundaries and offer new contestatory strategies, they also consider whether such phenomena may risk reinforcing existing social inequalities or perpetuate conservatism. The second section comprises six chapters and an afterword that deal with the nature of cyberliterature in all its many forms, from the (cyber)cultural legacies of writers such as Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges, to traditional print literature from the region that reflects on the subject of new technology, to weblogs and hypertext and hypermedia fiction proper.

This collection of critical essays investigates an emergent and increasingly important field of cultural production in Latin America: cyberliterature and cyberculture in their varying manifestations, including blogs and hypertext narratives, collective novels and e-mags, digital art and short Net-films. It provides a sustained academic focus on this area of cultural production, and investigates the ways in which cyberliterature and cyberculture in the broadest sense are providing new configurations of subjects, narrative voices and even political agency, for Latin Americans. The volume is divided into two main sections. The first comprises eight chapters on the broad area of cyberculture and identity formation/preservation, including the development of different types of cybercommunity in Latin America. While many of the chapters applaud the creative potential of these new virtual communities, identities and cultural products to create networks across boundaries and offer new contestatory strategies, they also consider whether such phenomena may risk reinforcing existing social inequalities or perpetuate conservatism. The second section comprises six chapters and an afterword which deal with the nature of cyberliterature in all its many forms, from the (cyber)cultural legacies of writers such as Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges, to traditional print literature from the region that reflects on the subject of new technology, to weblogs and hypertext and hypermedia fiction proper.