The Ecocriticism Reader

by Glotfelty, Cheryll; Fromm, Harold

• ISBN13: 9780820317816
• ISBN10: 0820317810
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr

Summary

The Ecocriticism Readeris the first collection of its kind, an anthology of classic and cutting-edge writings in the rapidly emerging field of literary ecology. Exploring the relationship between literature and the physical environment, literary ecology is the study of the ways that writing both reflects and influences our interactions with the natural world.An introduction to the field as well as a source book,The Ecocriticism Readerdefines ecological literary discourse and sketches its development over the past quarter-century. The twenty-five selections in this volume, a mixture of reprinted and original essays, look backward to origins and forward to trends and provide generally appealing and lucidly written examples of the range of ecological approaches to literature. Lists of recommended readings, relevant periodicals, and professional organizations offer direction for further study.The Ecocriticism Readeris an illuminating entree into a field of study fully engaged with our most pressing contemporary problem--the global environmental crisis.

Author Biography

Cheryll Glotfelty, an associate professor of literature and the environment at the University of Nevada, Reno, is the editor of Literary Nevada: Writings from the Silver State. She is a founding officer of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. Harold Fromm, author of The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Concsiousness, lives in Tucson and is Visiting Scholar in English at the University of Arizona. His writings have appeared in a wide range of journals and he is a regular contributor to the Hudson Review.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis
The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis	p. 3
Nature and Silence	p. 15
From Transcendence to Obsolescence: A Route Map	p. 30
Cultivating the American Garden	p. 40
The Uses of Landscape: The Picturesque Aesthetic and the National Park System	p. 52
Some Principles of Ecocriticism	p. 69
Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy	p. 92
Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism	p. 105
The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post-Structuralism Meet	p. 124
American Literary Environmentalism as Domestic Orientalism	p. 137
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction	p. 149
The Comic Mode	p. 155
Unearthing Herstory: An Introduction	p. 170
Speaking a Word for Nature	p. 182
The Postnatural Novel: Toxic Consciousness in Fiction of the 1980s	p. 196
Is Nature Necessary?	p. 204
Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism	p. 225
The Sacred Hoop: A Contemporary Perspective	p. 241
Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination	p. 264
A Taxonomy of Nature Writing	p. 276
Indexing American Possibilities: The Natural History Writing of Bartram, Wilson, and Audubon	p. 282
Desert Solitaire: Counter-Friction to the Machine in the Garden	p. 303
Heroines of Nature: Four Women Respond to the American Landscape	p. 323
Nature Writing and Environmental Psychology: The Interiority of Outdoor Experience	p. 351
The Bakhtinian Road to Ecological Insight	p. 371
Recommended Reading	p. 393
Periodicals and Professional Organizations	p. 401
Contributors	p. 403
Index	p. 409
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.