The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment

Louise Westling has been teaching in the English Department at the University of Oregon since 1977. She served as a visiting professor at the University of Tubingen and a Fulbright Professor at the University of Heidelberg, and as a president and founding member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. She is the author of The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction (1996), and of the forthcoming The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (2013).

This authoritative collection of rigorous but accessible essays investigates the exciting new interdisciplinary field of environmental literary criticism.

Introduction Louise Westling; Part I. Foundations: 1. Pastoral, anti-pastoral, and post-pastoral Terry Gifford; 2. The green otherworlds of early medieval literature Alfred Siewers; 3. 'Mapping by words': the politics of land in Native American literature Shari Huhndorf; Part II. Theories: 4. Ecocritical theory: romantic roots and impulses from twentieth-century European thinkers Axel Goodbody; 5. Nature, post nature Timothy Clark; 6. Violent affinities: sex, gender, and species in Cereus Blooms at Night Catriona Sandilands; 7. The lure of the wilderness Leo Mellor; Part III. Interdisciplinary Engagements: 8. 'Tongues I'll hang on every tree': biosemiotics and the Book of Nature Wendy Wheeler; 9. Sauntering along the border: Thoreau, Nabhan, and food politics Janet Fiskio; 10. Animal studies, literary animals, and Yann Martel's Life of Pi Sarah McFarland; Part IV. Major Directions: 11. Environmental justice, cosmopolitics, and climate change Joni Adamson; 12. Systems and secrecy: postcolonial ecocriticism and Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt; 13. Environmental crises and East Asian literatures: uncertain presents and futures Karen Thornber; 14. Confronting catastrophe: ecocriticism in a warming world Kate Rigby; 15. Ecocinema and the wildlife film Stephen Rust.