Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses

Introduction: Ecowitches, Ecofeminism and Earth Repair: Symbiotic Posthuman Narratives in the Age of the Symbiocene

2025-10-15T10:55:26+01:00

---

Literary Ecowitches in the Symbiocene: Healing the Wounds of the Earth and its Peoples through Lunarpunk Posthuman Re-Story-ation Narratives

2025-10-15T10:29:49+01:00

This article explores the contemporary literary ecowitch as a transformative figure within ecofeminist, ecocritical, and posthumanist thought. Grounded in ecofeminist revisionism and ecospiritual animist movements, the ecowitch (Sotelo 2025) is portrayed as a symbol of ecological resistance and healing that challenges dominant androanthropocentric worldviews through multispecies collaboration. The article analyses two stories from the new Lunarpunk Anthology (Norton-Kertson 2023) –to highlight storytelling as a form of magical activism. These narratives demonstrate speculative fiction’s capacity to imagine symbiotic, posthuman possible futures. Ultimately, the literary ecowitch becomes a visionary force in the Symbiocene (Albrecht 2019), fostering ecological reparation and resisting systemic eco-social injustices.

Searching for Summerland: Spiritualist Women, Edenic Nostalgia, and Eco-Utopian Communalism in the Nineteenth Century

2025-10-15T10:37:57+01:00

This article concentrates on the work of women connected to the Occult revival, examining narratives of interspecies harmony so as to suggest an interpretation of spiritualist communes as possibly proto-ecofeminist spaces. In order to do so, focus is first placed on how the notion of Summerland, or the spiritualist afterlife, inspired the development of anti-hierarchical cosmologies that would sustain reformist activism in spiritualist discourse. The utopian overtones of Spiritualism are traced back to the syncretic roots of the movement, which drew strongly on the desire to recover a lost Edenic bond between humans and nature. In these ways, by means of female leadership, vegetarianism, and agrarian self-sufficiency, occultist communal life developed a unique form of Utopianism, one which combined esoteric beliefs with a desire to reach the anti-industrialist Paradise announced by the spirits.

From Galicia to Ireland: Eco-Witches and Green Utopian Narratives in Álvaro Cunqueiro and W.B. Yeats

2025-10-15T10:45:43+01:00

This article offers a comparative ecocritical and ecofeminist reading of W.B. Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (2008) [1888] and Álvaro Cunqueiro’s Tertulia de boticas prodigiosas y escuela de curanderos (1976). It explores the literary witch as a symbolic mediator between humans and nature, bearer of botanical and spiritual knowledge in Irish and Galician traditions. Drawing on the poetics of breathing, the Symbiocene, and cultural studies, the article argues that these texts preserve ancestral wisdom while imagining alternative, symbiotic models of coexistence. The meiga and the fairy doctor emerge as agents of ecological resilience. In contrast to dystopian imaginaries, these green utopias offer ethical tools to reconnect with Gaia and envision regenerative futures.

Green Magic and Gendered Knowledge: Witches, Healing, and Herbal Resistance

2025-10-15T10:53:28+01:00

This paper explores the connection between medicinal plants and witchcraft in literature and folklore. It begins with the historical link between witches and botanical knowledge, showing how plants served in healing and sparked accusations of sorcery. A literary reading of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1995[1623]) highlights how herbs symbolize power and subversion. The study draws from European folklore and early modern texts to show plants as both empowering and persecuted symbols. It then bridges folklore with science by examining the pharmacological basis of traditional remedies. Finally, it looks at how modern herbalists and neo-pagan witches reclaim this knowledge for holistic healing. Combining literary, historical, and scientific perspectives, the paper reveals the cultural depth of plant-based witchcraft.

The Importance of Plants in Native American Oral Tradition

2025-10-15T11:02:23+01:00

This article aims to deepen the reader’s understanding of the profound connection between Native Americans and the natural world. The animistic spirit, a concept attributed to them by Europeans, is reflected in their oral traditions, ceremonies, attire, and rituals. In this section, we will explore their extensive knowledge of grains, trees, and plants, along with their various applications on physical, mental, and spiritual levels, challenging the romanticized and idealistic perceptions that Europeans held of Native Americans.

The Shaman Who Came in From the Ocean: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s Visual Narratives

2025-10-15T11:11:58+01:00

Between 2001 and 2023, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas recovered many of the traditions of the Haida nation in the North-Western Pacific coast, creating hybrid narratives halfway between the textual and the pictorial. Yahgulanaas used different adaptations of the ancestral figure of the shaman to express the journey his people have gone through. Yahgulanaas’s shamans are usually elements of confrontation between the static world of the Haidas and the external world, being the last barrier of defense against the destruction of the natural and social context in which the stories are held and told. The objective of this article is to focus on Yahgulanaas’s so-called “Haida mangas” in order to explore how his shamans (his transcendent characters) can heal society and history through a deep connection with the spiritual world of the Haidas and through a deep understanding of how the supernatural is connected to them.

Revisiting and Updating H.P. Lovecraft’s “THe Dreams in the Witch House”: Jaume Balagueró’s Venus as a Contemporary Feminist Witch Tale

2025-10-15T11:17:39+01:00

Jaume Balagueró’s film Venus (2022) adapts H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Dreams in the itch House” (1933), which amalgamates characteristic traits of cosmic horror, but presents them around the horror archetype of the witch. Balagueró’s adaptation transforms Lovecraft’s tale into a cinematic narrative which arises as a contemporary feminist story that vindicates female empowerment in the era of fourth-wave feminism and the post-humanities. A comparative analysis between both textualities based on Gérard Genette’s narratological theories will pave the way for identifying intertextual, metatextual and hypertextual connections, while it will also underscore the evolving interpretation of the witch from a figure of monstrosity to an icon of feminist struggle against patriarchy.

On Women and Birds: Ecofeminism and Animal Studies in Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron” and Katherine Mansfield’s “The Canary”

2025-10-15T11:25:35+01:00

This paper explores the short stories “A White Heron” (1886) by Sarah Orne Jewett, and “The Canary” (1922) by Katherine Mansfield through the postulates of ecofeminism and animal studies, respectively. In “A White Heron,” it is explored how the female protagonist must solve a predicament for which she has to choose either the financial safety that a man offers, or her own ecological belief system, which is deeply rooted in her identity. In “The Canary,” a lonely woman mourns the death of her canary. It is explored how interspecies relationships work in the case of domestic animals, and it is debated whether these are relationships of dominance/submission or of interdependence. While Mansfield’s text cannot ultimately escape anthropocentrism, as the bird is only conceptualized in relation to the woman, it is nevertheless a thoughtful, sensitive account of the love and admiration that human animals can feel for non-human animals.

Joanna Ellen Wood: A Silenced Female Author in English Canadian Fiction

2025-10-15T11:38:13+01:00

At the intersection between New Woman studies and motherhood studies, critical approaches to female literature can offer a renewed perspective that fosters the revitalization of silenced authors and works. When applied within the framework of nineteenth-century Canadian literature in English, new readings of dismissed writers and works from this intersectional critical perspective offer the chance of voicing their innovations and achievements. Although praised in her time, the attention paid to Joanna Ellen Wood and her novel The Untempered Wind (1894) within the Canadian literary framework has been ambivalent. The present analysis of her literary career and her novel demonstrate both deserve a place within Canadian literature still to be recovered.

Threaded: “Lines,” “The Bow,” “Free(Dom),” “From the River...,” “Pain,” “A Visit to My Land,” “Daughter of Fire,” “The Prison of Expectations,” “The Weight of Your Name,” “The Pain of Womanhood,” “Sisterhood,” & “The Fight to Be Seen”

2025-10-15T11:43:55+01:00

---

“Overflow:” “I, II, III”

2025-10-15T11:47:49+01:00

---

“Ode to the Sun”

2025-10-15T11:51:59+01:00

---

“The Beating Sea”

2025-10-15T12:11:53+01:00

---

Nomadic New Women: Exile and Border-Crossing Between Spain and the Americas, Early to Mid-Twentieth Century, edited by Renée M. Silverman & Esther Sánchez-Pardo

2025-10-15T12:16:13+01:00

---

Daniel Defoe’s Diario del año de la peste, edited, translated, & annotated by Antonio Ballesteros González & Beatriz González Moreno

2025-10-15T12:19:09+01:00

---