A Global History of Literature and the Environment

This book offers a wide-ranging international history of environmental writing from ancient Mesopotamian and Asian works to the present.

John Parham (Edited by), Louise Westling (Edited by)

9781107102620, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 December 2016

459 pages, 2 b/w illus.
23.5 x 16 x 2.9 cm, 0.78 kg

In A Global History of Literature and the Environment, an international group of scholars illustrate the immense riches of environmental writing from the earliest literary periods down to the present. It addresses ancient writings about human/animal/plant relations from India, classical Greece, Chinese and Japanese literature, the Maya Popol Vuh, Islamic texts, medieval European works, eighteenth-century and Romantic ecologies, colonial/postcolonial environmental interrelations, responses to industrialization, and the emerging literatures of the world in the present Anthropocene moment. Essays range from Trinidad to New Zealand, Estonia to Brazil. Discussion of these texts indicates a variety of ways environmental criticism can fruitfully engage literary works and cultures from every continent and every historical period. This is a uniquely varied and rich international history of environmental writing from ancient Mesopotamian and Asian works to the present. It provides a compelling account of a topic that is crucial to twenty-first-century global literary studies.

List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction Louise Westling and John Parham
Part I. Beginnings: 1. The natural world in ancient Mesopotamian literature Stephanie Dalley
2. Environments of early Chinese and Japanese literatures Karen Thornber
3. The Garden of Eden in the Hebrew Bible Deborah Green
4. Ecopoetics and the literature of ancient India Murali Sivaramakrishnan
5. Ancient Greek literature and the environment: a case study with Pindar's Olympian 7 Chris Eckerman
6. 'Who shall be a sustainer?': maize and human mediation in the Maya Popol Vuh Allen Christenson
7. I invoke God, therefore I am: nature's spirituality and its ecological impact in Islamic texts Sarra Tlili
Part II. The Development of Humanism and the Industrial Age: 8. 'Viking' ecologies: Icelandic sagas, local knowledge, and environmental memory Steven Hartman, Reinhard Hennig and Astrid Ogilvie
9. Human responses to the environment in Medieval literature Gillian Rudd
10. Remaking eighteenth-century ecologies: arboreal mobility Elizabeth H. Cook
11. Romantic ecology, Aboriginal culture, and the ideology of improvement in British Atlantic literature Kevin Hutchings
12. Natural history in the Anthropocene Laura Dassow Walls
13. Bleak House, Liquid City, Climate to Climax in Dickens Karen Chase and Michael Levenson
14. Fantastic metabolisms: a materialist approach to modern eco-speculative fiction Tom Sykes
Part III. The Anthropocene: 15. Climate and culture in Australia and New Zealand C. A. Cranston and Charles Dawson
16. Modern English fiction Kelly Sultzbach
17. Ecological thought and literature in Europe and Germany Hubert Zapf
18. From birds and trees to texts: an ecosemiotic look at Estonian nature writing Timo Maran and Kadri Tüür
19. Contemporary British poetry and the environment Leo Mellor
20. Rescuing nature from the nation: ecocritical (un)consciousness in modern Chinese culture Hangping Xu
21. Eating life at a contaminated table: the narrative significance of toxic meals in contemporary Japan Yuki Masami
22. Commodity frontiers, Caribbean natures, and the aesthetics of ecological revolution in Trinidadian literature Michael Niblett
23. Petro-violence and the act of bearing witness in contemporary Nigerian literature Byron Caminero-Santangelo
24. Black ants and bones: Nehruvian science and third-world environment in the fiction of Satyajit Ray Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee
25. Brazilian women poets on gender, nature, and the body Izabel F. O. Brandão
26. Can the environmental imagination save the world? Lawrence Buell
Further readings
Index.

Subject Areas: Environmentalist thought & ideology [RNA], Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: general [DSB]