Introduction

This book examines how texts and visual culture from nineteenth-century French-speaking contexts can enhance understanding of twenty-first-century challenges. It takes up an ecoregional paradigm at the crossroads of natural sciences and social sciences to evaluate the interplay between local experiences and global concerns about ecological disruptions tied to modernization. Contributors’ close readings make use of decentring methods to probe binaries such as canonical versus marginal. This diverse thinking is relevant to literary geography, social history, and the environmental humanities.