The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment

Description

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment is an authoritative guide to the exciting new interdisciplinary field of environmental literary criticism. The collection traces the development of ecocriticism from its origins in European pastoral literature and offers fifteen rigorous but accessible essays on the present state of environmental literary scholarship. Contributions from leading experts in the field probe a range of issues, including the place of the human within nature, ecofeminism and gender, engagements with European philosophy and the biological sciences, critical animal studies, postcolonialism, posthumanism, and climate change. A chronology of key publications and bibliography provide ample resources for further reading, making The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment an essential guide for students, teachers, and scholars working in this rapidly developing area of study.

Louise Westling has been teaching in the English Department at the University of Oregon since 1977. She served as a visiting professor at the University of Tubingen and a Fulbright Professor at the University of Heidelberg, and as a president and founding member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. She is the author of The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction (1996), and of the forthcoming The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (2013).

'... provides a wide-ranging overview of the first three decades of ecocriticism, gives both a thorough introduction of the field to the novice, as well as suggestions for those more familiar with the field on where ecocriticism is going next. Consequently, it is an important contribution to the development of the field, and a testimony to its growing importance as a mode of analysis.' Astrid Bracke, English Studies