The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment
The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment
Environmental criticism is a relatively new discipline that brings the global problem of environmental crisis to the forefront of literary and cultural studies. This introduction defines what eco-criticism is and provides a set of conceptual tools to encourage students to look at the texts they're reading in a new way.
- Relates environmental studies to literature, showing how texts can be read with green issues in mind
- Offers practical models to students for reading and writing environmental criticism and theory
- Boxed sections map out the current theoretical debates in the field in an accessible way
Reviews & endorsements
"This book offers an explanatory overview of ecocentric literary and cultural criticism and serves as an introduction to the concepts, methods, and arguments of ecocriticism."
-Scott Slovic,Isle of Oxford Journals
"In this superb book, Timothy Clark has achieved what the best introductions for
students achieve: brief, accurate and readable summaries of the main positions in a field, combined with a series of provocative and stimulating questions to be explored in class. Clark has done this and more - he has written a book that any ecocritic should read, since as well as setting out the central dilemmas with a rare clarity and sharpness, it asks searching questions that challenge some of ecocriticism's most established positions."
-Richard Kerridge, Green Letters
"Far from a pedestrian college textbook, Clark’s Introduction to Literature and the Environment is an erudite survey of ecocriticsm accessible to both scholar and student, as well as a practical tool for demonstrating literature’s representation of and engagement with environmental issues of all kinds … I can think of no better intellectual map of ecocriticism’s present state or future prospects than this book."
Modern Philology
Product details
December 2010Adobe eBook Reader
9780511924446
0 pages
0kg
18 b/w illus.
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: the challenge
- Part I. Romantic and Anti-Romantic:
- 1. Old World Romanticism
- 2. New World Romanticism
- 3. Genre and the ethics of nonfiction
- 4. Language beyond the human?
- 5. The inherent violence of Western thought?
- 6. Posthumanism and the 'end of nature'
- Part II. The Boundaries of the Political:
- 7. Thinking like a mountain?
- 8. Environmental justice and the move 'beyond nature writing'
- 9. European eco-justice
- 10. Liberalism and Green moralism
- 11. Ecofeminism
- 12. 'Postcolonial' eco-justice
- 13. Questions of scale: the local, the national and the global
- Part III. Science and the Struggle for Intellectual Authority:
- 14. Science and the crisis of authority
- 15. Science studies
- 16. Evolutionary theories of literature
- 17. Interdisciplinarity and science: two essays on human evolution
- Part IV. The Animal Mirror:
- 18. Ethics and the nonhuman animal
- 19. Anthropomorphism
- 20. The future of ecocriticism
- Further reading
- Index.
