Sultzbach's book provides a wide-ranging investigation into how the works of Forster, Woolf, and Auden helped shape our environmental imagination.

Although modernism has traditionally been considered an art of cities, Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination claims a significant role for modernist texts in shaping environmental consciousness. Analyzing both canonical and lesser-known works of three key figures - E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and W. H. Auden - Sultzbach suggests how the signal techniques of modernism encourage readers to become more responsive to the animate world and non-human minds. Understanding the way these writers represent nature's agency becomes central to interpreting the power dynamics of empire and gender, as well as experiments with language and creativity. The book acknowledges the longer pastoral tradition in literature, but also introduces readers to the newly expanding field of ecocriticism, including philosophies of embodiment and matter, queer ecocriticism, and animal studies. What emerges is a picture of green modernism that reifies our burgeoning awareness of what it means to be human within a larger living community.

With Thoreau’s Walden as a touchstone, Buell offers an account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of Western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more “ecocentric” way of being. In doing so, he provides a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature.

Modern literature and environmentalism combined ecology, psychology, and aesthetics to restore communal well-being to the United Kingdom after world war.

Affective Materialities reexamines modernist theorizations of the body and opens up the artistic, political, and ethical possibilities at the intersection of affect theory and ecocriticism, two recent directions in literary studies not typically brought into conversation. Modernist creativity, the volume proposes, may return to us notions of the feeling, material body that contemporary scholarship has lost touch with, bodies that suggest alternative relations to others and to the world. Contributors argue that modernist writers frequently bridge the dichotomy between body and world by portraying bodies that merge with or are re-created by their surroundings into an amalgam of self and place. Chapters focus on this treatment of the body through works by canonical modernists including William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster alongside lesser-studied writers Janet Frame, Herbert Read, and Nella Larsen. Showing the ways the body in literature can be a lens for understanding the fluidities of race, gender, and sexuality, as well as species and subjectivity, this volume maps the connections among modernist aesthetics, histories of the twentieth-century body, and the concerns of modernism that can also speak to urgent concerns of today.

Ecocriticism has emerged as one of the most fascinating and rapidly growing fields of recent literary and cultural studies. From its regional origins in late-twentieth-century Anglo-American academia, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, which involves a decidedly transdisciplinary and transnational paradigm that promises to return a new sense of relevance to research and teaching in the humanities. A distinctive feature of the present handbook in comparison with other survey volumes is the combination of ecocriticism with cultural ecology, reflecting an emphasis on the cultural transformation of ecological processes and on the crucial role of literature, art, and other forms of cultural creativity for the evolution of societies towards sustainable futures. In state-of-the-art contributions by leading international scholars in the field, this handbook maps some of the most important developments in contemporary ecocritical thought. It introduces key theoretical concepts, issues, and directions of ecocriticism and cultural ecology and demonstrates their relevance for the analysis of texts and other cultural phenomena.

The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism explores a range of critical perspectives used to analyze literature, film, and the visual arts in relation to the natural environment. Since the publication of field-defining works by Lawrence Buell, Jonathan Bate, and Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm in the 1990s, ecocriticism has become a conventional paradigm for critical analysis alongside queer theory, deconstruction, and postcolonial studies. The field includes numerous approaches, genres, movements, and media, as the essays collected here demonstrate. The contributors come from around the globe and, similarly, the literature and media covered originate from several countries and continents. Taken together, the essays consider how literary and other cultural productions have engaged with the natural environment to investigate climate change, environmental justice, sustainability, the nature of "humanity," and more. Featuring thirty-four original chapters, the volume is organized into three major areas. The first, History, addresses topics such as the Renaissance pastoral, Romantic poetry, the modernist novel, and postmodern transgenic art. The second, Theory, considers how traditional critical theories have expanded to include environmental perspectives. Included in this section are essays on queer theory, science studies, deconstruction, and postcolonialism. Genre, the final major section, explores the specific artforms that have animated the field over the past decade, including nature writing, children's literature, animated films, and digital media. A short section entitled Views from Here concludes the handbook by zeroing in on the various transnational perspectives informing the continued dissemination and globalization of the field.