"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

Contents
Abstract ..............................................................................................................…. ii
Contents ...............................................................................................................… v
Acknowledgements .............................................................................................… vii
Introduction ........................................................................................................… 1
Chapter One: Ecology, Literary Ecocriticism and Douglas Livingstone .......... 12
Ecology, towards a definition and an understanding of the concept ........… 13
A brief history of ecology .........................................................................… 19
Ecological literary criticism ......................................................................… 20
Ecopoetics .................................................................................................… 24
The role of the imagination .......................................................................… 30
Science and poetry ..................................................................................... 34
Douglas Livingstone as ecologist .............................................................. 35
Overview of the literature .......................................................................... 38
Chapter Two: Douglas Livingstone: His Life, Work
and the Critical Response to his Earlier Work ................................................. 43
His life ........................................................................................................ 45
His work ..................................................................................................... 46
D.J. Livingstone's scientific work .............................................................. 47
Douglas Livingstone's poetry and the South African tradition .................. 50
Catching a curved ball: the misinterpretation of Livingstone's concerns ..... 57
An ecological overview of the critical response to Livingstone's
earlier work……………………………………………………………….. 59
Chapter Three: An Ecocritical Examination of Douglas Livingstone's
Earlier Work…………………………………………………… 74
A brief overview of the ecological in Livingstone's earlier work ................. 74
What is nature? ............................................................................................. 76
Livingstone's themes within the broader ecological framework .................. 81
1. Evolutionary theory ..................................................................................82
2. Humankind's ambivalent relationship with nature ................................... 87
Humankind as part of nature ............................................................. 87
Humankind as apart from nature ....................................................... 94
3. Ecological equilibrium ..............................................................................100
4. Ecological destruction .............................................................................. 110
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