ABSTRACT
As never before, complex and serious treatments of environmental crisis are a regular feature of the U.S. literary landscape. This literature represents an internalization of environmental crisis into literary production in a number of ways. First, literature now treats a wide variety of the critical environmental problems discussed throughout this book. Though recent writing has concentrated perhaps most powerfully on the toxification of people (a particularly hot-button, populist issue, the subject of Chapter 4), its subjects also include a variety of types of ecosystem degradation and damage (discussed in Chapter 3), both of the scenarios for systemic environmental crisis discussed in Chapter 5, and the growth of risk society, discussed in Chapter 6. Second, literature dealing with these issues is now spread across a wide spectrum of genres. Concern with environmental crisis has understandably been a major preoccupation of literary nonfiction in the nature tradition; it is also increasingly a subject for poetry and fiction outside the nature tradition. Third, environmental crisis appears in recent literature not just as a foregrounded theme but much more complexly and actively as a part of writers’ construction of their characters’ psyches, thoughts, and actions; writers’ creation of fictional conflicts and plots; and writers’ crafting of narrative structure, voice, and other aspects of style. Finally, in internalizing environmental crisis so completely, contemporary literature represents it more and more as a regular and unavoidable feature of daily life-as a context society now dwells in, not a future to be feared. If contemporary literary concern with environmental crisis began as a niche activity-appearing first in postCarson science fiction as immi nent apocalypse-since then it has broadened and deepened its role in U.S. literary production; that development and some of its most important achievements so far are the subject of this chapter.
