Book Review: Rowland, Susan. The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, Evolutionary Complexity and Jung.

Susan Rowland’s The Ecocritical Psyche is fundamentally groundbreaking. Her previous writings on a range of subjects from Jung and literary theory, feminist revisioning of Jung’s ideas, and analyses of Jung as a writer to the relevance of Jung’s ideas to the humanities culminates in her bringing Jung’s vision of the unconscious as creative to ecological literary studies. To enter this discourse, she shares a trove of theory so well integrated as to open up the field of literary criticism with a model of how to be relevant to the world. Rowland is striving to do nothing less than persuade that reading literature has the power to transform human relations to nature, or, as she often calls it, non-human reality.