urn:lcp:isbn_9780803717961:epub:214102b5-f279-47f6-bd71-1b1b8ed5db37 Extramarc University of Toronto Foldoutcount 0 Identifier isbn_9780803717961 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t9m33zc2h Isbn 0803717962

Young, Rebecca. (2018). Confronting Climate Crises Through Education: Reading Our Way Forward. Lanham, Lexington Books: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Tresca, Don. (n.d.). Maternal Ambition and the Quiet Righteous Malice of Motherhood: An Examination of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Medusa’. MuseMedusa. Accessed January 8, 2017, from http://musemedusa.com/dossier_1/tresca/. These robotic lamentations should convince the reader of her seemingly mechanical origins, however these are the cries of the river and its wildlife, of which she is born. We learn that this river is linked to a nearby waste disposal plant, which is beginning to kill everything natural nearby to it due to its rapacious growth as a business. Gifford, Terry. (2008). Rivers and Water Quality in the Work of Brian Clarke and Ted Hughes. Concentric, 34(1), 75–91.

Written as an intervention on behalf of water quality and public health, The Iron Woman has a much stronger and more active environmental agenda than The Iron Man and can be read as a redemptive story for a society that has cut itself off from ‘being human’ and from being part of the larger web of life. By raising awareness and engaging directly with our ecological crisis both novels can be read as eco-fables or healing myths which can challenge us to alter our perceptions from anthropocentric to biocentric. Hughes really doesn't soften the ecological message intended for his young readership; the fantastical scenes have a very real, matter-of-factness about them. Even the surreal humour of the factory workers and ignorant townspeople, transforming into all varieties of fish and pond life, asks the horrific question of 'is it too late? Have we gone too far?'. Despite the positive ending to the book, those questions will be the resounding sentiments to its readers.urn:oclc:863542439 Republisher_date 20120517214318 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20120516215950 Scanner scribe7.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Worldcat (source edition) Ted Hughes firmly believed that the most important way to communicate is through storytelling. People understand and become more engaged when they learn through stories. Visual arts and literature are important vectors of change in the ethical plane and, as such, can be seen as valuable tools of ecological awareness and moral transformation. Literature promotes attitudes and values—especially in the young reader—and can stimulate reflection on the moral consideration of the non-human world and even induce action. In response to drastic climate change, it is necessary today, more than ever, to offer a discourse of hope. One that inspires and allows us to imagine resilience. But how can younger generations persuade older generations and take agency to take steps to repair and protect our environment? Can literature lead to action and become a rationale for change? What is perhaps more relevant, in line with Carson, is that Hughes uses The Iron Woman to explore how environmental issues are social issues. This political discourse which would now be recognised by ecocritics as environmental justice—the concern for both environment and human’s dependency upon it—can also be read in the novel. As Zoe Jacques points out, “Both children’s fiction and posthumanism, then, might be said to have the unique potential to offer a forward-focused agenda that unites the possibilities of fantasy with demonstrable real-world change” (Jacques, 2015, p. 206). However, it is not only hope that these young women provide but potential solutions to the ongoing issues of climate change, standing up, like Lucy, to the threats from patriarchal systems or neoliberal capitalism and the effects of the Anthropocene. Their call to action can inspire change and empower other women, challenging traditional gender roles. As Castro claims: “In this cultural moment of political “girl power”, girls are reshaping concepts of gender in line with their cultural, historical, material and social circumstances” (Castro, 2021, p. 202). Bright, Bonnie. (2010). Facing Medusa: Alchemical Transformation through the Power of Surrender. Accessed January 2, 2017, from http://www.depthinsights.com/pdfs/Facing_Medusa_Alchemical_Surrender-BBright-052010.pdf.

Written half-way between a modern fairy-tale and a science-fiction myth, Hughes’s narrative describes how a giant “metal man” appears from the sea and falls from a cliff, only to reassemble himself, and begin devouring anything metal. He soon becomes a problem for the local farmers who decide to dig a pit to capture him and bury him. However, after being buried he rises again and when a monstruous alien descends from outer space and threatens the extinction of all life on Earth, the Iron Man defends the people and restores peace. Basu, Balaka, Broad, Katherine R., and Hintz, Carrie (Eds.). (2013). Contemporary Dystopian. Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. NY: Routledge. Yes we have fantasy in full flight both in how it dealt with and how it is concluded but for me that is not the point. The point here is that something that does not have a voice is given one and from there the real power comes. Ironically this could be applied to a lot of things today - where currently there is no way of them to tell their story and share their pain - what would come if of it if suddenly they were able to do so. Whilst in America Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax (1971) is considered by many as the book that began “the environmental movement in children’s literature” (Dobrin and Kidd, 2004, p. 11) and as a canonical text of literary environmentalism for the classroom, Ted Hughes’s The Iron Man (1968) has long been part of the curriculum throughout schools in Britain and continues to remain on the reading lists as a standard text for primary schools in the UK. Both read as examples of early environmental texts that convey didactic messages about the need for humans to become better caretakers of the earth. One of the primary functions of such texts is that they can help young children understand contemporary ecological issues and reveal how humans have disrupted the harmony of our planet, positioning young people to reflect on responsible ecocitizenship. Conserving the new materialist understanding of the nonhuman (biotic and abiotic) as already part of the human in the world’s becoming, posthuman ecocriticism seeks to maintain a sustainable ecological critique of the material interaction of bodies and natures in a highly technologized world and their conceptualizations in literary and cultural texts (Oppermann, 2016, p. 30).Young female protagonists, such as Lucy, are often read as being counterparts to real-life heroines. In the words of Ingrid E. Castro, “Constructions of YA fantasy protagonists, who are usually strong, motivated, young, and female, increasingly overlap with real-life media images of powerful girls” ( 2021, p. 202). Literature provides a safe space for exploring female identities and imagining the future. Today there is a long list of female ecowarriors in YA fiction who might inspire young women: from Walt Disney’s Pocahontas, or Princess Leia, to Tenar in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea to the likes of Lucy, or more recent heroines such as Katniss Everdeen, the young female protagonist of Suzanne Collins’s trilology The Hunger Games (2008–2010), or Samantha Steadman in Joanne MacGregor’s Eco-warriors series (2011–2016). Dobrin, Sidney I., and Kidd, Kenneth B. (Eds.). (2004). Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. More recently, Eman El Nouhy ( 2017) has compared Hughes’s narrative to that of the Medusa, claiming that by fusing the myth he is able “to facilitate an archetypal awakening that might reach his readers’ unconscious and hence force them to recognize the atrocities they have committed against Nature, who is also ‘‘the female in all its manifestations’’” (El Nouhy, 2017, p. 349). Despite noting the female aspect, El Nouhy fails to mention the importance of Lucy in the novel, and instead repeatedly insists that Hughes uses the Medusa myth as a metaphor for a “defiled, victimized woman—for Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide shortly after she discovered that Ted Hughes had committed adultery” ( 2017, p. 350) overlooking the overtly environmental dimension of the novel and the fact that Hughes had already written The Iron Man as a healing myth for his children and as a way to express his own grief. By promoting environmental values such as an ethics of care, reciprocal respect and empathy and by unifying humans, nature and technology, The Iron Woman successfully puts forward Hughes’s own social and political concerns and reads as a potential healer of broken bonds between humanity and nature offering a redemptive sense of hope.

Rahn, Suzanne. (1995). Special issue: ‘Green Worlds: Nature and Ecology’. The Lion and the Unicorn, 19(1995), 149–170. Most characteristic verse of this English writer for children without sentimentality emphasizes the cunning and savagery of animal life in harsh, sometimes disjunctive lines. El Nouhy, Eman. (2017). Redeeming the Medusa: An Archetypal Examination of Ted Hughes. The Iron Woman, Children’s Literature in Education, 50(3), 347–363. The Iron Woman is much lesser known and is much much stranger. The Iron Woman rises from the marshes early on to warn humanity that pollution is killing everything and it must stop. With appearances from Hogarth and the Iron Man this is another story that will have children snorting with laughter but also have them thinking about the environment and how we have caused so much damage to it. A very timely reminder throughout the novel that it is men who have been the main cause of the damage and they bear the brunt of the punishment and learning of the lesson.

In Confronting Climate Crises Through Education ( 2018) Rebecca L. Young makes a compelling case for how literature and empathetic reading strategies can lead to action and become a rationale for change. Introducing environmental concerns in the classroom literature can be a platform for engaging both children and young adults, thanks to the emotional response created. fruit of a human and reason-centred culture that is at least a couple of millennia old, whose contrived blindness to ecological relationships is the fundamental condition underlying our destructive and insensitive technology and behaviour. To counter these factors, we need a deep and comprehensive restructuring of culture that rethinks and reworks human locations and relations to nature all the way down (Plumwood, 2002, p. 8).