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  3. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment
  • Cited by 196
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2012
Print publication year:
2011
Online ISBN:
9780511976261
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511976261
Subjects:
Literature, English Literature: General Interest, Literary Theory
Series:
Cambridge Introductions to Literature
Information

Book description

The degrading environment of the planet is something that touches everyone. This 2011 book offers an introductory overview of literary and cultural criticism that concerns environmental crisis in some form. Both as a way of reading texts and as a theoretical approach to culture more generally, 'ecocriticism' is a varied and fast-changing set of practices which challenges inherited thinking and practice in the reading of literature and culture. This introduction defines what ecocriticism is, its methods, arguments and concepts, and will enable students to look at texts in a wholly new way. Boxed sections explain key critical terms and contemporary debates in the field with 'hands-on' examples and comparisons. Timothy Clark's thoughtful approach makes this an ideal first encounter with environmental readings of literature.

Reviews

‘The challenge Clark faces comes [from] … the assertion that literary studies can make a significant contribution to the rapidly evolving ecological debate … This challenge makes the depth and breadth of Clark’s penetrating survey all the more impressive.’

Source: The Times Literary Supplement

'Clark guides the student reader to ask good, difficult questions of environmental justice, eco-postcolonial criticism, and phenomenology. I must pronounce [his] book an outstanding introduction to ecocriticism.'

Greg Garrard Source: ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

'In this superb book, Timothy Clark has achieved what the best introductions for students achieve: brief, accurate and readable summaries of the main positions in a field, combined with a series of provocative and stimulating questions to be explored in class. Clark has done this and more - he has written a book that any ecocritic should read.'

Richard Kerridge Source: Green Letters

'Far from a pedestrian college textbook, Clark’s Introduction to Literature and the Environment is an erudite survey of ecocriticsm accessible to both scholar and student, as well as a practical tool for demonstrating literature’s representation of and engagement with environmental issues of all kinds … I can think of no better intellectual map of ecocriticism’s present state or future prospects than this book.'

Source: Modern Philology

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Contents

Page 1 of 2

Contents

Page 1 of 2

References
Further reading
Introduction
General sources
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, www.asle.org/ ASLE's Resources site offers an online bibliography and also lists online material introducing ecocriticism, www.asle.org/site/resources/ecocritical-library/intro/ Google Scholar
Journals
Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism (journal of the UK branch of ASLE), www.green-letters.org.uk/ Google Scholar
Indian Journal of Ecocriticism, http://osle-india.org/journal.html Google Scholar
ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment), founded in 1993 Google Scholar, the official journal of ASLE, http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/
Journal of Ecocriticism, http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/joe Google Scholar
General critical anthologies
Armbruster, Karla, and Wallace, Kathleen R. (eds.), Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001 Google Scholar).
Branch, Michael P., and Slovic, Scott (eds.), The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993–2003 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003 Google Scholar).
Bryson, J. Scott (ed.), Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002 Google Scholar).
Coupe, Lawrence (ed.), The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2000 Google Scholar).
Gersdorf, Catrin, and Mayer, Sylvia (eds.), Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006 Google Scholar).
Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Fromm, Harold (eds.), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996 Google Scholar).
Ingram, Annie Merril, et al. (eds.), Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007 Google Scholar).
Kerridge, Richard, and Sammells, Neil (eds.), Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature (London: Zed Books, 1998 Google Scholar).
Murphy, Patrick D. (ed.), Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998 Google Scholar). Especially useful for its international range.
Tallmadge, John, and Harrington, Henry (eds.), Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000 Google Scholar).
Other useful overviews
Buell, Lawrence, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2005 Google Scholar).
Greg, Garrard, Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2004 Google Scholar).
Heise, Ursula K., ‘Greening English: Recent Introductions to Ecocriticism’, Contemporary Literature 47.2 (2006 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 289–98.
Definitions of ‘nature’
Soper, Kate, What is Nature? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995 Google Scholar).
Williams, Raymond, Keywords (London: Flamingo, 1993 Google Scholar).
Williams, Raymond. ‘Ideas of Nature’, in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1996 Google Scholar), 67–85.
Worster, Donald, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 1994 Google Scholar).
Climate change
Australian National University, Climate Change Institute, www.anu.edu.au/climatechange/ Google Scholar
Behringer, Wolfgang, A Cultural History of Climate, trans. Camiller, Patrick (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2010 Google Scholar). A suggestive if necessarily rather speculative account of effects of changes in climate upon mainly European cultural history over the millennia.
Bhaskar, Roy, et al. (eds.), Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change (London: Routledge, 2010 Google Scholar).
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35 (winter 2009 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 197–222.
Cohen, Tom, and Colebrook, Claire Google Scholar (eds.), ‘Critical Climate Change’, a forthcoming open access book series on climate change in the humanities with Open Humanities Press. See openhumanities.org
‘Institute on Critical Climate Change in the Humanities,’ www.criticalclimatechange.com/ Google Scholar
King's College Cambridge, ‘Global Warming Resources’, www.kings.cam.ac.uk/global-warming/ Google Scholar
Shearman, David, and Smith, Joseph Wayne, The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007 Google Scholar). On how climate change forms a crisis as to the legitimacy of dominant forms of government and economics, especially liberal democracy.
Romantic and anti-romantic
Morton, Timothy, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008 Google Scholar).
Phillips, Dana, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (Oxford University Press, 2003 CrossRef | Google Scholar).
Old world romanticism
Jonathan, Bate (ed.), Green Romanticism, special issue of Studies in Romanticism 35.3 (1996 Google Scholar).
Harrison, Gary Google Scholar (ed.), ‘Romanticism, Nature, Ecology’, in Romantic Circles, Commons section, www.rc.umd.edu/pedagogies/commons/ecology/harrison/harrison.html. A useful collection of recent essays.
Hutchings, Kevin, ‘Ecocriticism in British Romantic Studies’, Literature Compass 4.1 (2007 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 172–202. A detailed and comprehensive survey, especially strong on the issues of animal rights in the romantic period and new developments such as attention to ‘urban ecology’ in the London of Leigh Hunt and Thomas de Quincey.
McKusick, James C., Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St Martin's, 2000 Google Scholar).
Morton, Timothy, ‘Environmentalism’, in Roe, Nicholas (ed.), Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford University Press, 2004 Google Scholar), 696–707.
‘Deep ecology’
Drengson, Alan, and Inoue, Yuichi (eds.), The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995 Google Scholar).
Luke, Timothy W., ‘Deep Ecology as Political Philosophy’, Chapter 1 of his Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 Google Scholar). Very critical.
Salleh, Ariel, ‘Class, Race, and Gender Discourse in the Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology Debate’, in Max Oelschalager (ed.), Postmodern Environmental Ethics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995 Google Scholar).
Zimmerman, Michael, Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994 Google Scholar). Assesses debates between ‘deep ecology’, ‘social ecology’ and ecofeminism.
New world romanticism
Abrams, Robert E., ‘Image, Object, and Perception in Thoreau's Landscapes: The Development of Anti-Geography’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 46 (1991 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 245–62.
Cranston, C. A., and Zeller, Robert (eds.), The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007 Google Scholar). As Libby Robbin observes in a review, ‘Neither the transcendental romantic wilderness view (the American canon) nor the pastoral romantic (the classic British genre) work for the Australian landscape and its peoples’: Australian Humanities Review 42 (August 2007), www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-August-2007/EcoHumanities/Robin.html#book
Cronon, William, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, in Cronon, William (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1995 Google Scholar). A seminal and in its time very controversial attack on romantic and evasive conceptions of ‘wilderness’ in US culture.
Mazel, Don, American Literary Environmentalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000 Google Scholar). On the wilderness ‘mystique’ and how conceptions of the environment in the US reflect an often nationalist cultural politics.
Petrulionis, Sandra Harbert, and Dassow Walls, Laura (eds.), More Day to Dawn: Thoreau's Walden for the Twenty-First Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007 Google Scholar).
Scheese, Don, Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America (New York: Twayne, 1996 Google Scholar).
Wilson, Eric, Romantic Turbulence: Chaos, Ecology and American Space (New York: St Martin's, 2000 CrossRef | Google Scholar). Locates American Romantic writers (mainly Emerson, Fuller, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman) in the historical development of ecological consciousness, with consideration of the literary forms read as enacting such understanding.
Genre and the question of non-fiction
Farber, Paul Lawrence, Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000 Google Scholar).
Gifford, Terry, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999 Google Scholar). A study of the various senses and histories of the genre.
Morris, David Copland, ‘Inhumanism, Environmental Crisis, and the Canon of American Literature’, ISLE 4.2 (autumn 1997 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 1–16. ‘Inhumanism’ names the stance or discipline, mainly associated with the poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962), of affirming views of life that resist a human-centred perspective.
Selzer, Jack (ed.), Understanding Scientific Prose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993 Google Scholar). Innovative essays analyse the discourse of a famous essay on the nature of evolution (‘Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm’ by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin), attentive to the intellectual and conceptual effects of kinds of rhetoric in the writing of science.
Sweeting, Adam, and Crochunis, Thomas C., ‘Performing the Wild: Rethinking Wilderness and Theater Space’, in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001 Google Scholar), 325–40. On some surprising connections between the conventions of theatrical realism (e.g. the pretence that spectators are absent) and space-based notion of wilderness.
Language beyond the human?
Berghaller, Hannes, ‘“Trees are what everyone needs”: The Lorax, Anthropocentrism, and the Problem of Mimesis’, in Gersdorf, Catrin and Mayer, Sylvia (eds.), Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006 Google Scholar), 155–75. Another critique of Buell's ‘realism’.
Berry, Wendell, Standing by Words: Essays (Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 1983 Google Scholar). Relates the disastrous environmental illiteracy of modern societies to a ‘disintegration of language’.
Kenneally, Christine, The First Word: The Search for the Origin of Language (London: Viking, 2007 Google Scholar).
Morton, Timothy, chapter on ‘ecomimesis’ in Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008 Google Scholar), 29–79. Attacks some ecocriticism for merely indulging rather than critically examining the produced effect of some nature writing that language may convey the natural world directly, without mediation.
Nielsen, Dorothy M., ‘Prosopopoeia and the Ethics of Ecological Advocacy in the Poetry of Denise Levertov and Gary Snyder’, Contemporary Literature 34 (1993 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 691–713. On poetic techniques that aim to transgress given distinctions between human and non-human (for instance, is Levertov's calling trees ‘awake’ a literal or figurative expression?).
The inherent violence of western thought?
Clark, Timothy, Martin Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2001 Google Scholar). An introduction focussed on Heidegger and the literary.
Bruyn, Ben, ‘The Gathering of Form: Forests, Gardens and Legacies in Robert Pogue Harrison’, in Timothy Clark (ed.), Deconstruction, Environmentalism and Climate Change, special issue of Oxford Literary Review 32.1 (2010 Google Scholar), 19–36. An introductory overview of Harrison's work.
Foltz, Bruce V., Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995 Google Scholar).
Harrison, Robert Pogue, The Dominion of the Dead (University of Chicago Press, 2003 CrossRef | Google Scholar). On the place and power of the dead in human cultures.
Harrrison, Robert Pogue, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 2008 CrossRef | Google Scholar).
Zimmerman, Michael, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990 Google Scholar).
Harrrison, Robert Pogue. ‘Rethinking the Heidegger – Deep Ecology Relationship’, Environmental Ethics 15.3 (autumn 1993 Google Scholar): 195–224.
Post-humanism and the ‘end of nature’?
Badmington, Neil (ed.), Posthhumanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000 CrossRef | Google Scholar).
Bartlett, Laura, and Byers, Thomas B., ‘Back to the Future: The Humanist “Matrix”’, Cultural Critique 53 (winter 2003 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 28–46. A reading from a post-humanist stance of the film The Matrix (dirs. Andy and Larry Wachowski).
Dougherty, Stephen, ‘Culture in the Disk Drive: Computation, Mimetics, and the Rise of Posthumanism’, Diacritics 31.4 (winter 2001 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 85–102.
Palmer, Louis H., III, ‘Articulating the Cyborg: An Impure Model of Environmental Revolution’, in Rosendale, Steven (ed.), The Greening of Literary Scholarship (University of Iowa Press, 2002 Google Scholar), 165–77.
Strickler, Breyan, ‘The Pathologization of Environmental Discourse: Melding Disability Studies and Ecocriticism in Urban Grunge Novels’, ISLE 15.1 (winter 2008 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 111–34.
Westling, Louise, ‘Literature, the Environment, and the Question of the Posthuman’, in Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer (eds.), Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006 Google Scholar), 25–48.
The boundaries of the political
Dobson, Andrew, Green Political Thought, 4th edn (London: Routledge, 2007 Google Scholar).
Dryzek, John S., and Schlosberg, David (eds.), Debating the Earth: The Environmental Politics Reader, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 2005 Google Scholar).
Elliott, Lorraine, Global Politics of the Environment, 2nd edn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 CrossRef | Google Scholar).
Linkola, Pentti, Can Life Prevail?: A Radical Approach to the Environmental Crisis, trans. Rautio, Eeuto (London: Integral Tradition Publishing, 2009 Google Scholar). The work of this ‘deepest’ of deep ecologists is not exactly ‘recommended’ but highlighted for a provocative extremism useful for forcing readers to clarify their own position: ‘Never before in history have the distinguishing values of a culture been things as concretely destructive for life and the quality of life as democracy, individual freedom and human rights – not to mention money’ (154).
Thinking like a mountain?
Fromm, Harold, ‘Aldo Leopold: Aesthetic “Anthropocentrist”’, in Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic (eds.), The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism 1993–2003 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003 Google Scholar), 3–9. An attack on Leopold's arguably dated notions of the ecological as still inherently aesthetic and anthropocentric.
Moore, Kathleen Dean, and Sideris, Lisa H. (eds.), Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008 Google Scholar).
Ryden, Kent C., ‘“How could a weed be a book?”: Books, Ethics, Power, and a Sand County Almanac’, ISLE 15.1 (winter 2008 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 1–10. On the trope of ‘reading’ nature in Leopold and the development of a non-human-centred ecological literacy.
Environmental justice and the move ‘beyond nature writing’
Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992 Google Scholar).
Beck, Ulrich, World Risk Society (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1998 Google Scholar).
Bennett, Michael, and Teague, David W. (eds.), The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999 Google Scholar).
Dwyer, June, ‘Ethnic Home Improvement: Gentrifying the Ghetto, Spicing up the Suburbs’, ISLE 14.2 (summer 2007 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 165–82.
Grewe-Volpp, Christa, ‘Nature “out there” and as “a social player”: Some Basic Consequences for a Literary Critical Analysis’, in Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer (eds.), Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006 Google Scholar), 71–86. Relates to the tension between objectivist/realist and constructivist approaches to the natural world. Argues for ways of conceptualising it both as an material entity and as an agent in human culture in its own right. See ‘The antinomy of environmental criticism’ at the end of Chapter 8.
Harvey, David, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1996 Google Scholar). On social and environmental justice.
Outka, Paul, Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Palgrave, 2008 CrossRef | Google Scholar).
Yamashiro, Shin, ‘An Introduction to “Environmental Justice” in North American Ecocriticism: Its Origin and Practice’, in Selvamony, Nirmal et al. (eds.), Essays in Ecocriticism (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2007 Google Scholar), 40–56.
‘Social ecology’
Foster, John Bellamy, Ecology Against Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002 Google Scholar).
Foster, John Bellamy, Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000 Google Scholar). Refutes the common view that Marx ignored ecological issues.
Institute for Social Ecology, www.social-ecology.org/ Google Scholar
Light, A. (ed.), Social Ecology after Bookchin (New York: Guildford Press, 1998 Google Scholar).
Zimmerman, Michael, Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994 Google Scholar). Assesses debates between ‘deep ecology’, ‘social ecology’ and ecofeminism.
Two readings: European ecojustice
Goodbody, Axel (ed.), The Culture of German Environmentalism: Anxieties, Visions, Realities (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2002 Google Scholar).
Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (1973; London Google Scholar: Hogarth, 1993).
Gersdorf, Catrin and Mayer, Sylvia (eds.), Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006 Google Scholar).
Gersdorf, Catrin and Mayer, Syvia (eds.), Natur-Kultur-Text: Beiträge zu Ökologie und Literaturwissenschaft (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2005 Google Scholar).
Liberalism and green moralism
Hinchman, Lewis P., and Hinchman, Sandra K., ‘Should Environmentalists Reject the Enlightenment?’, Review of Politics 63 (2001 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 663–92.
Roszak, Theodore, Gomes, Mary E. and Kanner, Allen D. (eds.), Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1995 Google Scholar). Essays on the controversial relation of individual psychic health to the health of the planet (listed here because this issue involves notions of selfhood at odds with the individualistic norms of autonomy/independence central to the dominant liberal tradition in politics).
Thiele, Leslie Paul, ‘Nature and Freedom: A Heideggerian Critique of Biocentric and Sociocentric Environmentalism’, Environmental Ethics 17 (1995 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 171–90.
Wissenburg, Marcel, Green Liberalism: The Free and the Green Society (University College London Press, 1998 Google Scholar). An attempt to reconcile liberalism and environmental politics. For a critique, see Robyn Eckersley, The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), Chapter 4.
Ecofeminism
Alaimo, Stacy, ‘Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for an Environmental Feminism’, Feminist Studies 20 (1994 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 133–54. On the debate between Donna Haraway's post-humanist ‘cyborg’ manifesto and some ecofeminist arguments.
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, ‘Queering Ecocultural Studies’, Cultural Studies 22 (2008 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 455–76.
Sandilands, Catriona, ‘Desiring Nature: Queering Ethics: Adventures in Erotogenic Environments’, Environmental Ethics 23 (2001 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 169–88.
Warren, Karren J. (ed.), Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997 Google Scholar). A useful critical anthology.
‘Post-colonial’ ecojustice
Allan, Chavkin, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony: A Casebook (Oxford University Press, 2002 Google Scholar).
‘Green Postcolonialism’, special issue of Interventions 9.1 (2007), ed. Huggan, Graham and Tiffin, Helen CrossRef | Google Scholar.
Guha, Ramachandra, ‘Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Protection: A Third World Critique’, Environmental Ethics 11 (1989 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 71–83.
Kamada, Roy Osamu, ‘Postcolonial Romanticisms: Derek Walcott and the Melancholic Narrative of Landscape’, in Bryson, J. Scott (ed.), Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002 Google Scholar), 207–20.
Nixon, Rob, ‘Environmentalism and Postcolonialism’, in Loomba, Ania, Kaul, Suvir, Bunzl, Matti, Burton, Antoinette and Esty, Jed (eds.), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005 Google Scholar), 233–51.
Ombaka, Christine, ‘War and Environment in African Literature’, in Patrick Murphy, (ed.), Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998 Google Scholar), 327–36.
Overpopulation
Bandarage, Asoka, Women, Population, and Global Crisis: A Political–Economic Analysis (London: Zed Books, 1997 Google Scholar). A synthesis of Third World, feminist, socialist and ecological thinking and solutions, criticising the assumption that overpopulation is one of the root causes of global crisis.
Meadows, D., Randers, J. and Behrens, W. III, The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (London: Earthscan, 2005 Google Scholar).
Questions of scale: the local, the national and the global
Ball, Eric L., ‘The Place Within: Scott Russell Sanders on Literature and Art of Place’, ISLE 15.2 (summer 2008 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 137–55.
Murphy, Patrick D., ‘Grounding Anotherness and Answerability through Allonational Ecoliterature Formations’, in Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer (eds.), Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006 Google Scholar), 417–34. An application of thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin to environmental politics, the state and the ethical claims of non-human others.
Smith, Mick, ‘Against the Enclosure of the Ethical Commons: Radical Environmentalism as an “Ethics of Place”’, Environmental Ethics 18 (1997 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 339–53.
Talent, David, ‘The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History’, Journal of American History 86 (1999 Google Scholar): 965–75.
Science and the struggle for intellectual authority
Science and the crisis of authority
Demeritt, David, ‘The Construction of Global Warming and the Politics of Science’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91 (2001 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 307–37.
Oates, Matthew, ‘The Dying of the Light: Values in Nature and the Environment’, British Wildlife 18.2 (December 2006 Google Scholar): 88–95. Argues how the would-be scientific terminology of nature conservation obscures what are actually decisions about ethical and political values.
Walls, Laura Dassow, ‘Seeking Common Ground: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities’, in Annie Merril Ingram, et al. (eds.), Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007 Google Scholar), 199–208.
Woods, Gioia, ‘Sci-Animism: American Poetry and Science’, ISLE 15.2 (summer 2008 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 199–210.
Science studies
Asdal, Kristin, ‘The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-Constructivist Challenge to Environmental History’, History and Theory 42.4 (December 2003 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 60–74. Good critical introduction to Haraway and Latour in relation to ecological thinking (focussed on issues of gender in particular).
Gifford, Terry, ‘The Social Construction of Nature’, ISLE 13.2 (1996 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 27–35.
Grafen, Alan, and Ridley, Mark (eds.), Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think (Oxford University Press, 2007 Google Scholar).
Guillory, John, ‘The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism’, Critical Inquiry 28 (2002 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 470–508. Overview of a notorious controversy in the mid 1990s about the nature and status of ‘science studies’.
Latour, Bruno,Remodelling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2007 Google Scholar). Perhaps Latour's most accessible book.
Latour, Bruno, ‘The Impact of Science Studies on Political Philosophy’, Science, Technology, and Human Values 16.1 (winter 1991 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 3–19.
Rose, Dan, ‘The Repatriation of Anthropology’ [on Latour's We Have Never Been Modern, 1993], American Literary History 8 CrossRef | Google Scholar.1 (spring 1996): 170–83.
Evolutionary theories of literature
Cohen, Michael P., ‘Reading after Darwin: A Prospectus’, in Annie Merril Ingram et al. (eds.), Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007 Google Scholar), 221–33.
Seamon, Roger, review of Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2005 Google Scholar): 298–300.
Interdisciplinarity and science: two essays on human evolution
Moeran, Joe, Interdisciplinarity (New Critical Idiom), 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2010 Google Scholar).
Adelson, Glenn, and Elder, John, ‘Robert Frost's Ecosystem of Meanings in “Spring Pools”’, ISLE 13.2 (2006 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 1–17.
Roorda, Randall, ‘Antinomies of Participation in Literacy and Wilderness’, ISLE 14.2 (summer 2007 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 71–87.
The animal mirror
Animal Studies Bibliography (online), Michigan State University, http://ecoculturalgroup.msu.edu/bibliography.htm Google Scholar
Institute for Critical Animal Studies, www.criticalanimalstudies.org/ ‘The aim of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) is to provide a space for the development of a “critical” approach to animal studies, one which perceives that relations between human and nonhuman animals are now at a point of crisis which implicates the planet as a whole.’ Google Scholar
Ethics and the non-human animal
Danta, Chris, and Vardoulakis, Dimitris (eds.), ‘The Political Animal’, special issue of SubStance 37.3 (2008 CrossRef | Google Scholar).
Derrida, Jacques, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. Wills, David (New York: Fordham, 2008 Google Scholar). A sustained deconstruction of the intellectual underpinnings of speciesism.
Haraway, Donna, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness, 2nd edn (Chicago University Press, 2003 Google Scholar). Focussed on the human–dog relationship, Haraway studies how the two species co-evolved with each other as workers/helpers, companions/friends or threats and enemies. See also her When Species Meet (Posthumanities) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Raglon, Rebecca, and Scholtmeijer, Marian, ‘“Animals are not believers in ecology”: Mapping Critical Differences between Environmental and Animal Advocacy Literatures’, ISLE 14.2 (summer 2007 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 121–40.
Ryder, Richard D., Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes Towards Speciesism, 2nd edn (London: Berg, 2000 Google Scholar).
‘Anthropomorphism’
Crist, Eileen, Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999 Google Scholar).
Haraway, Donna, ‘Otherworldly Conversations: Terran Topics, Local Terms’, in The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004 Google Scholar), 125–50. On the ‘animal–industrial’ complex, modes of discourse about animals and animal subjectivity (‘What is inter-subjectivity between radically different kinds of subjects?’ [143]).
McMurry, Andrew, ‘“In their own language”: Sarah Orne Jewett and the Question of Nonhuman Speaking Subjects’, ISLE 6.1 (1999 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 51–63.
Rees, Amanda, ‘Anthropomorphism, Anthropocentrism, and Anecdote: Primatologists on Primatologists’, Science, Technology, and Human Values 26 (2001 CrossRef | Google Scholar): 227–47. On the peculiar difficulties posed in the study of creatures similar to ourselves.

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