ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some ideas on the relationship between sustainability and literature based on the approach of cultural ecology. In the first part, it outlines some core ideas of cultural ecology and relates them to the debate about the cultural dimension of sustainability that has recently been gaining momentum. In the second part, it argues that literature contributes to a specifically complex and ethically responsive form of cultural sustainability by combining long-term and short-term perspectives, cultural memory and cultural creativity in ever-new scenarios of embodied culture-nature interaction. In the third part, the chapter extends the semantic range of ‘sustainability’ by emphasising the experimental, non-systemic and creative aspects of literary sustainability, which are illustrated in the notion of ‘wildness’ as a textual source of (re-)generative energy in major examples from American novels and poetry.
