“Amazingly clear and incisive readings of a wide range of discourses related to animals and ecology. With an impressive eye for detail and the ‘big picture,'’Arran Stibbe gives real insights into the relationship between language, values, and actions.” (Karla Armbruster, coeditor of Beyond Nature Writing)

"Animals Erased: Discourse, Ecology and Reconnection with the Natural World" is the first book-length application of critical discourse analysis to power relations between humans and animals. Written in a lively and accessible style, the book analyses a wide range of linguistic features including agency, transitivity, presupposition, metaphor, metonymy, nominalization, semantic inclusion, pronoun use, lexical sets, and semantic gaps. The strength of the book is in how it connects the micro-analysis of linguistic features with the larger picture of the prevailing social order. This is achieved through showing how clusters of features come together in a range of key discourses to shape social reality in particular ways, with important consequences for how humans treat animals and the ecosystems that human life depends on. Among the discourses analyzed are those of factory farming, ecology, news reporting, EFL textbooks, nature poetry, and the multimodal discourse of animated films. For linguistics researchers, the book opens up a new area of enquiry that addresses the increasingly urgent topic of human relationships with the natural world and the consequences of those relationships for the sustainability of society. For students, the book provides a stark and clear illustration of the power of language to shape relationships and structure the social order, of discursive struggle and the consequences of alternative discursive constructions of reality, and of the specific linguistic mechanisms that give language the power to shape reality.

The author, Arran Stibbe, is a Reader in Ecological Linguistics at the University of Gloucestershire. He has an academic background in both linguistics and human ecology and combines the two in his research and teaching in the area of Critical Discourse Analysis. He is the founder of the Language and Ecology Research Forum (www.ecoling.net) and editor of the Handbook of Sustainability Literacy (www.sustainability-literacy.org).