Pandemics are not only medical emergencies but sociocultural, political, and economic ones as well. The social epidemiology of COVID-19 not only reveals such interconnections but also makes clear the relationship between emergence of new viruses (such as SARS-CoV-2) and climate change. Indeed, the threads of connectivity between the submicroscopic world of viruses and the planetary scope of climate breakdown are not tenuous but enveloped by a rhetoric of crisis that deliberately obscures marginalized communities. Scholarship in the environmental humanities, in postcolonial and race studies, and in discourses on gender provide urgent recalibrations of the limited scope of pandemic rhetoric.

Dragons, being imaginary creatures, escape the umbra of extinction shadowing multiple species on earth today. We can trace their lineage from Homer (at least in the European tradition) to the personal mount of of Daenerys Targaryen, Drogon, in Game of Thrones; or, from Beowulf to J. R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Because they are textual creatures, dragons display a re-silience and capacity to mutate that makes them eloquent ontological signifiers in mythic narratives, as motifs of epistemological uncertainty in folklore and cultural memory, and as embodiments of extra-human/pre-modern intrusions in the workings of history. Whereas Chinese dragons are often beneficial to the human species, European variants (including those found in Celtic folklore) are not. Dragons spell death and destruction; they demand human sacrifices, as in the legend of St. George. Their appearance suggests power and menace of extraordinary dimensions, as in Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock. (The Jabber-wock was first illustrated by John Tenniel in 1871 as a dragon, and the tradition continues well into the present day, in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, for example.) Dragons collude with destructive forces; their power to annihilate everything that stands for “human” is unwittingly referred to in Kanye West’s words above.2 I suggest in this essay that the image of the dragon offers us a portal into the highly ornate symbolic structures of W. B. Yeats’s historiography and his vision of the apocalyptic.

Financial speculation and capitalist accumulation leave spatial and temporal traces. When the waves of the global financial collapse reached Ireland and culminated in the extreme measure of the comprehensive state guarantee, the receding excesses of the Celtic Tiger revealed a landscape that was gentrified and alienating. The spectrality of the ghost estates of Ireland became a synecdochal signifier of Ireland's ignominious fall from the podium of neoliberal grace and the focus of both popular lament and critical intervention. This essay provides a deferred assessment of the uncanniness of dwelling in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland by concentrating on the socioecological fallout of ruins and the longterm casualties of land speculation: that is, transformations of landscape into real estate, and of place into property. Reading Ireland's ghost estates as ‘imperial formations’ that ‘register the ongoing quality of processes of decimation, displacement, and reclamation’ – to use Ann Laura Stoler's term – the essay brings to the fore questions of dwelling and homeliness that suggest more protracted imperial processes which ‘saturate the subsoil of people's lives and persist, sometimes subjacently, over a longer durée’. To demonstrate these arguments the essay will analyse works by Kevin Barry, Sara Baume, and Claire Keegan.

This essay explores the environmental aesthetic of Romesh Gunesekara's Reef and analyses its unique commentary on the conflation of political and ecological violence in Sri Lanka. The essay examines the ways in which aesthetic works circumscribe the temporal dislocation and conceptual difficulties attributed to slowly evolving environmental degradation. Reef is a novel about the process' of environmental damage rather than a direct engagement with the causality of such irreversible transformation. Its reticence about a scopic elaboration of environmental destruction mirrors the political and geographical invisibility' of the despoilation of Sri Lanka's coral reefs.

This special issue is concerned with readings of literary texts that reposition and reinvigorate postcolonial studies in the twenty-first century. If, after 9/11, the war against terror dominates g...

This editorial review essay looks at the culture of publishing and reviewing books about South Asia in Britain in the interwar period.

In current debates within postcolonial ecocriticism developmental issues faced by postcolonial nation‐states are often sidetracked in favour of an historicist approach that charts the importance of environmental politics in the colonial period. However, while such an historicism is important, this essay argues that postcolonial ecocriticism needs urgently to analyse the current environmental and developmental conditions in which the postcolonial subject resides. This essay, using Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide as a case study, argues that postcolonial ecocritical literature requires a consideration of the interconnections between postcoloniality, environmentalism and economic development.