Ecopoetics in Late Antiquity and Beyond

Welcome to Coming After: Ecopoetics in Late Antiquity and Beyond. This project, based at Ghent University, brings contemporary ecocriticism into dialogue with late antiquity, with a broad and inclusive scope.

Late antique and other premodern literature is rich with more-than-human worlds and entanglements: riverscapes, deserts, oceans, long journeys, storms, droughts, ruins, churches, cities, animals, saints, songs. Ecocriticism – along with related approaches such as posthumanism, material ecocriticism, and thing studies – can thus open up new understandings of the strange and vibrant poetics of late antique literature and art. In turn, the untimeliness and strangeness of late antiquity and premodernity can be applied to our understanding of ecocriticism itself. What is “late antique” about contemporary ecocritical thinking? How does the sense of belatedness, of coming after the end, shape today’s ecocritical conversations?

We invite anyone working at the crossroads of ecocriticism and late antiquity (both broadly defined) to enter an open-ended and curious conversation about ecocriticism, the ‘late antique’, and the sense of coming after.