Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature Series

Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century showcases the recent explosive expansion of environmental criticism, which is actively transforming three areas of broad interest in contemporary literary and cultural studies: history, scale, and science. With contributors engaging texts from the medieval period through the twenty-first century, the collection brings into focus recent ecocritical concern for the long durations through which environmental imaginations have been shaped. Contributors also address problems of scale, including environmental institutions and imaginations that complicate conventional rubrics such as the national, local, and global. Finally, this collection brings together a set of scholars who are interested in drawing on both the sciences and the humanities in order to find compelling stories for engaging ecological processes such as global climate change, peak oil production, nuclear proliferation, and food scarcity. Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century offers powerful proof that cultural criticism is itself ecologically resilient, evolving to meet the imaginative challenges of twenty-first-century environmental crises.

Introduction Section 1: Science 1. The Mesh 2. Posthuman/Postnatural: Ecocriticism and the Sublime in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 3. Revisiting the Virtuoso: Natural History Collectors and Their Passionate Engagement with Nature 4. Chimerical Figurations at the Monstrous Edges of Species 5. The City Refigured: Environmental Vision in a Transgenic Age Section 2: History 6. Ecopoetics and the Origins of English Literature 7. Amerindian Eden: the Divine Weekes of Du Bartas 8. Erasure by U.S. Legislation: Ruiz de Burton’s Nineteenth Century Novels and the Lost Archive of Mexican American Environmental Knowledge 9. Shifting the Center: A Tradition of Environmental Literary Discourse from Africa 10. Ecomelancholia: Slavery, War and Black Ecological Imaginings Section 3: Scale 11. Home Again: Peak Oil, Climate Change, and the Aesthetics of Transition 12. Reclaiming Nimby: Nuclear Waste, Jim Day, and the Rhetoric of Local Resistance 13. Imagining a Chinese Eco-City 14. "No Debt Outstanding": The Postcolonial Politics of Local Food 15. Pathways to the Sea: Involvement and the Commons in Works by Ralph Hotere, Cilla McQueen, Hone Tuwhare, and Ian Wedde. Afterword: An Interview with Elaine Scarry

Ken Hiltner is an Associate Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Stephanie LeMenager is Associate Professor at UC-Santa Barbara.

Teresa Shewry is Assistant Professor of Literature and Environment at University of California, Santa Barbara.