1st Edition

Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century

Edited By Stephanie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry, Ken Hiltner Copyright 2011
    310 Pages 22 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    328 Pages 22 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century showcases the recent explosive expansion of environmental criticism, which is actively transforming three areas of broad interest in contemporary literary and cultural studies: history, scale, and science. With contributors engaging texts from the medieval period through the twenty-first century, the collection brings into focus recent ecocritical concern for the long durations through which environmental imaginations have been shaped. Contributors also address problems of scale, including environmental institutions and imaginations that complicate conventional rubrics such as the national, local, and global. Finally, this collection brings together a set of scholars who are interested in drawing on both the sciences and the humanities in order to find compelling stories for engaging ecological processes such as global climate change, peak oil production, nuclear proliferation, and food scarcity. Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century offers powerful proof that cultural criticism is itself ecologically resilient, evolving to meet the imaginative challenges of twenty-first-century environmental crises.

    Introduction. Stephanie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner  Section I: Science  1. The Mesh. Timothy Morton  2. Posthuman/Postnatural: Ecocriticism and the Sublime in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Paul Outka  3. Revisiting the Virtuoso: Natural History Collectors and Their Passionate Engagement with Nature. Beth Fowkes Tobin  4. Chimerical Figurations at the Monstrous Edges of Species. Jill Casid  5. The City Refigured: Environmental Vision in a Transgenic Age. Allison Carruth  Section II: History  6. Ecopoetics and the Origins of English Literature. Alfred K. Siewers  7. Amerindian Eden: the Divine Weekes of Du Bartas. Edward M. Test  8. Erasure by U.S. Legislation: Ruiz de Burton’s Nineteenth Century Novels and the Lost Archive of Mexican American Environmental Knowledge. Priscilla Solis Ybarra  9. Shifting the Center: A Tradition of Environmental Literary Discourse from Africa. Byron Caminero-Santangelo  10. Ecomelancholia: Slavery, War and Black Ecological Imaginings. Jennifer James Section III: Scale  11. Home Again: Peak Oil, Climate Change, and the Aesthetics of Transition. Michael G. Ziser  12. Reclaiming Nimby: Nuclear Waste, Jim Day, and the Rhetoric of Local Resistance. Cheryll Glotfelty  13. Imagining a Chinese Eco-City. Julie Sze and Yi Zhou  14. "No Debt Outstanding": The Postcolonial Politics of Local Food. Susie O’Brien  15. Pathways to the Sea: Involvement and the Commons in Works by Ralph Hotere, Cilla McQueen, Hone Tuwhare, and Ian Wedde. Teresa Shewry  Afterword. An Interview with Elaine Scarry

    Biography

    Ken Hiltner is an Associate Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara.

    Stephanie LeMenager is Associate Professor at UC-Santa Barbara.

    Teresa Shewry is Assistant Professor of Literature and Environment at University of California, Santa Barbara.