ABSTRACT

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.

part 1|86 pages

Science

chapter 1|12 pages

The Mesh

chapter 2|18 pages

Posthuman/Postnatural

Ecocriticism and the Sublime in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

chapter 3|12 pages

Revisiting the Virtuoso

Natural History Collectors and Their Passionate Engagement with Nature

chapter 5|18 pages

The City Refigured

Environmental Vision in a Transgenic Age

part I|76 pages

History

chapter 7|14 pages

Amerindian Eden

The Divine Weekes of Du Bartas

chapter 8|13 pages

Erasure by U.S. Legislation

Ruiz de Burton's Nineteenth-Century Novels and the Lost Archive of Mexican American Environmental Knowledge

chapter 9|15 pages

Shifting the Center

A Tradition of Environmental Literary Discourse from Africa

chapter 10|16 pages

Ecomelancholia

Slavery, War, and Black Ecological Imaginings

part II|82 pages

Scale

chapter 11|15 pages

Home Again

Peak Oil, Climate Change, and The Aesthetics of Transition

chapter 12|20 pages

Reclaiming Nimby

Nuclear Waste, Jim Day, and the Rhetoric of Local Resistance

chapter 13|15 pages

Imagining a Chinese Eco-City

chapter 14|16 pages

“No Debt Outstanding”

The Postcolonial Politics of Local Food

chapter 15|14 pages

Pathways to the Sea

Involvement and the Commons in Works by Ralph Hotere, Cilla McQueen, Hone Tuwhare, and Ian Wedde