Storied matter / Jeffrey Jerome Cohen -- Stories come to matter / Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann -- From ecological postmodernism to material ecocriticism : creative materiality and narrative agency / Serpil Oppermann -- Limits of agency : notes on the material turn from a systems-theoretical perspective / Hannes Bergthaller -- Creative matter and creative mind : cultural econology and literary creativity / Hubert Zapf -- Natural play, natural metaphor, and natural stories : biosemiotic realism / Wendy Wheeler -- The ecology of colors : Goethe's materialist optics and ecological posthumanism / Heather I. Sullivan -- Bodies of Naples : stories, matter, and the landscapes of porosity / Serenella Iovino -- When it rains / Lowell Duckert -- Painful material realities, tragedy, ecophobia / Simon C. Estok -- Semiotization of matter : a hybrid zone between biosemiotics and material ecocriticsm / Timo Maran -- Pro/polis : three forays into the political lives of bees / Catriona Sandilands -- Excremental ecocriticism and the global sanitation crisis / Dana Phillips -- Oceanic origins, plastic activism, and new materialism at sea / Stacy Alaimo -- Meditations on natural worlds, disabled bodies, and a politics of cure / Eli Clare -- Corporeal fieldwork and risky art : Peter Goin and the making of Nuclear landscapes / Cheryll Glotfelty -- Of material sympathies, Paraclesus, and Whitman / Jane Bennett -- Source of life : Avatar, Amazonia, and an ecology of selves / Joni Adamson -- The liminal space between things : epiphany and the physical / Timothy Morton -- Spirits that matter : pathways toward a rematerialization of religion and spirituality / Kate Rigby -- Mindful new materialisms : Buddhist roots for material ecocriticsm's flourishing / Greta Gaard -- The commonwealth of breath / David Abram.