The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities

Description

This Companion offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the environmental humanities, an interdisciplinary movement that responds to a world reconfigured by climate change and its effects, from environmental racism and global migration to resource impoverishment and the importance of the nonhuman world. It addresses the twenty-first century recognition of an environmental crisis - its antecedents, current forms, and future trajectories - as well as possible responses to it. This books foregrounds scholarship from different periods, fields, and global locations, but it is organized to give readers a working context for the foundational debates. Each chapter examines a key topic or theme in Environmental Humanities, shows why that topic emerged as a category of study, explores the different approaches to the topics, suggests future avenues of inquiry, and considers the topic's global implications, especially those that involve environmental justice issues.

Jeffrey J. Cohen is Dean of Humanities at Arizona State University and former co-president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. He is widely published in the fields of medieval studies, monster theory, and the environmental humanities. His book Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman received the 2017 Rene Wellek Prize in comparative literature from the American Comparative Literature Association. In collaboration with Lindy Elkins-Tanton he co-wrote the book Earth, a re-examination of our widest home from the perspectives of a planetary scientist and a literary humanist. With Julian Yates he is co-writing Noah's Arkive: Towards an Ecology of Refuge. Stephanie Foote is the Jackson and Nichols Chair of English at West Virginia University. She is the author of Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2001), The Parvenu's Plot: Gender, Culture, and Class in the Age of Realism (2014), and the editor, with Elizabeth Mazzolini, of Histories of the Dustheap: Waste, Material Cultures, Social Justice (2012). She is the co-founder and co-editor of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. Her articles have appeared in numerous edited collections and journals, such as American Literature, American Literary History, Signs, The Henry James Review, College Literature, Pedagogy, J19, and PMLA. She is currently working on The Art of Waste, a project about waste and literature.

'All in all, the collection is a compendious description of various approaches to reading ... Highly recommended.' G. D. MacDonald, Choice Magazine