The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment

Description

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.

Sarah Ensor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also a Faculty Associate at the Center for Culture, History, and Environment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. She works at the nexus of American literature, environmental studies, and queer theory. Susan Scott Parrish is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of English and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan, where she is also Chair of the Michigan Society of Fellows. She researches the history of how races and environments have been mutually constituted in North America since the colonial period, with a special emphasis on the plantation zone understood in an Atlantic context. She has written two prize-winning books: The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (2017) and American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (2006).