The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment

Offers an overview of American environmental literature across genres and time periods, introducing readers to a range of ecocritical methodologies.

Sarah Ensor (Edited by), Susan Scott Parrish (Edited by)

9781108841900, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 March 2022

300 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.6 kg

This Companion offers a capacious overview of American environmental literature and criticism. Tracing environmental literatures from the gates of the Manzanar War Relocation Camp in California to the island of St. Croix, from the notebooks of eighteenth-century naturalists to the practices of contemporary activists, this book offers readers a broad, multimedia definition of 'literature', a transnational, settler colonial comprehension of America, and a more-than-green definition of 'environment'. Demonstrating links between ecocriticism and such fields as Black feminism, food studies, decolonial activism, Latinx studies, Indigenous studies, queer theory, and carceral studies, the volume reveals the persistent relevance of literary methods within the increasingly interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities, while also modeling practices of literary reading shaped by this interdisciplinary turn. The result is a volume that will prove indispensable both to students seeking an overview of American environmental literature/criticism and to established scholars seeking new approaches to the field.

Introduction Sarah Ensor and Susan Scott Parrish
Part I. Environmental Histories: 1. Scenes of human diminishment in early American natural history Christoph Irmscher
2. Slavery and the anthropocene Paul Outka
3. (In)conceivable futures: Henry David Thoreau and reproduction's queer ecology Sarah Ensor
4. Narrating animal extinction from the pleistocene to the anthropocene Timothy Sweet
5. Pastoral reborn in the anthropocene: Henry David Thoreau to Kyle Powys Whyte Wai Chee Dimock
Part II. Environmental Genres and Media: 6. The heat of modernity: The great gatsby as petrofiction Harilaos Stecopoulos
7. Children in transit/children in Peril: The contemporary US novel in a time of climate crisis Min Hyoung Song
8. Meta-critical climate change fiction: Claire Vaye Watkins's gold fame citrus Rick Crownshaw
9. Junk food for thought: Decolonizing diets in Tommy Pico's poetry Nicole Seymour
10. Tender woods: Looking for the black outdoors with Dawoud Bey Susan Scott Parrish
Part III. Environmental Spaces, Environmental Methods: 11. Urban narrative and the futures of biodiversity Ursula Heise
12. Japanese American incarceration and the turn to earth: Looking for a man named Komako in bad day at black rock Mika Kennedy
13. Leisure over labor: Latino outdoors and the production of a Latinx outdoor recreation identity Sarah D. Wald
14. Sanctuary: literature and the colonial politics of protection Matt Hooley
15. The queer restoration poetics of Audre Lorde Angela Hume.

Subject Areas: Environmentalist thought & ideology [RNA], Indigenous peoples [JFSL9], Hispanic & Latino studies [JFSL4], Food & society [JFCV], Literary theory [DSA]