Ecocriticism has grown into one of the most innovative and urgent fields of the humanities, and many useful ecocritical approaches for addressing our environmental crisis have been developed, discussed, and reconsidered during the last decade.

From various perspectives, ecocriticism both adopts and criticizes traditional analytical and theoretical models, resulting in an impressive methodological diversity, pushing the boundaries of the humanities. Contemporary Ecocritical Methods exemplifies this methodological variety and serves as a practical entry into the field. Fourteen chapters, written by scholars from various ecocritical sub-fields of environmental humanities, introduce a rich set of perspectives and their analytical tools.

Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Climate Crisis Through Art and Media provides an extensive understanding of the climate crisis as it is represented in a number of medial forms, including scientific reports, popular science, graphic novels, documentaries, websites, feature films, and advertising. Theoretically, this is the first book that combines two important theories from the humanities: ecocriticism and intermedial studies. The book carefully develops Intermedial Ecocriticism as a method of investigating how climate crisis is represented and communicated through diverse media types. The chapters each include a comparative analysis of two or three specific media products and how they mediate the climate crisis.

In this introductory chapter, the authors outline the background of the handbook and the sad reasons why Lars Elleström could not finalize the project that he had sketched. Following this, a few of the “slogans” of intermedial studies are briefly mentioned and discussed, before all chapters in the handbook receive an opening comment.

This chapter introduces The Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS) and presents the theoretical and institutional legacy of its founder Lars Elleström to the field of intermedial studies.We present central aspects of his theoretical framework and we discuss how concepts such as the media product, the media modalities, and media transformation respond to central challenges in intermedial theory. Also, we demonstrate how they have been applied in intermedial analysis at IMS and internationally as a flexible framework that can be connected with approaches to media. Finally, we put forth some of the challenges to Elleström’s framework as a media-centered model of communication and hint at possible ways to meet these.

This chapter introduces The Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS) and presents the theoretical and institutional legacy of its founder Lars Elleström to the field of intermedial studies.We present central aspects of his theoretical framework and we discuss how concepts such as the media product, the media modalities, and media transformation respond to central challenges in intermedial theory. Also, we demonstrate how they have been applied in intermedial analysis at IMS and internationally as a flexible framework that can be connected with approaches to media. Finally, we put forth some of the challenges to Elleström’s framework as a media-centered model of communication and hint at possible ways to meet these.