A Global History of Literature and the Environment

John Parham · Louise Westling

Dec 2016 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

In A Global History of Literature and the Environment, an international group of scholars illustrate the immense riches of environmental writing from the earliest literary periods down to the present. It addresses ancient writings about human/animal/plant relations from India, classical Greece, Chinese and Japanese literature, the Maya Popol Vuh, Islamic texts, medieval European works, eighteenth-century and Romantic ecologies, colonial/postcolonial environmental interrelations, responses to industrialization, and the emerging literatures of the world in the present Anthropocene moment. Essays range from Trinidad to New Zealand, Estonia to Brazil. Discussion of these texts indicates a variety of ways environmental criticism can fruitfully engage literary works and cultures from every continent and every historical period. This is a uniquely varied and rich international history of environmental writing from ancient Mesopotamian and Asian works to the present. It provides a compelling account of a topic that is crucial to twenty-first-century global literary studies.

About the author

John Parham is Associate Head of Research and Principal Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies in the Institute of Humanities and Creative Arts at the University of Worcester. He has written Green Media and Popular Culture: An Introduction (2016) and Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination (2010), edited The Environmental Tradition in English Literature (2002) and has co-edited Literature and Sustainability: Exploratory Essays (forthcoming). He has published extensively on Victorian ecology (including studies of Dickens, Mill, Gaskell and Zola) and green popular culture.

Louise Westling taught in the English Department at the University of Oregon from 1977 to 2015 and in the Environmental Studies Program from 1996 to 2015. Her publications include Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor (1985); The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction (1996); The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (2013); and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge, 2013).