Contributed papers presented at two ecocriticism conferences organized by Indian Association for Studies in Contemporary Literature in English ... [et al.].

In 1996 the ecocriticism reader appeared, a seminal work defining a then relatively new approach to literary criticism through the lens of environmental and nature studies. Reading Under the Sign of Nature is the first volume to demonstrate the practice of ecocriticism on a wide range of literary texts representing diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural perspectives. Twenty-two essays masterfully exhibit how a variety of ideas -- bioregionalism, feminism, Buddhism, postmodernism, and phenomenology -- can inform that practice. Included in this volume are critiques of prose and poetry by American writers that have long been in the literary and nature-writing canons, as well as interrogations of work by authors from Native American, African American, Occidental, and Far Eastern traditions. In this long-awaited anthology, a select group of scholars deftly employs the ecocritical approach on a valuable body of contemporary and traditional literature, evincing the rich possibilities for this form of inquiry without, as the editors note, "spinning off into obscurantism or idiosyncrasy".

Together, their work signals a new direction in the field and offers refreshingly original insights into a broad spectrum of texts.

Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies is unique due to its rare assemblage of essays, which has not appeared within an edited collection before. Romantic Ecocriticism is distinct because the essays in the collection develop transnational and transhistorical approaches to the proto-ecological early environmental aspects in British and American Romanticism. First, the edition’s transnational approach is evident through transatlantic connections such as, but are not limited to, comparisons among the following writers: William Wordsworth, William Howitt, and Henry D. Thoreau; John Clare and Aldo Leopold; Charles Darwin and Ralph W. Emerson. Second, the transhistorical approach of RomanticEcocriticism is evident in connections among the following writers: William Wordsworth and Emily Bronte; Thomas Malthus and George Gordon Byron; James Hutton and Percy Shelley; Erasmus Darwin and Charlotte Smith; Gilbert White and Dorothy Wordsworth among others. Thus, Romantic Ecocriticism offers a dynamic collection of essays dedicated to links between scientists and literary figures interested in natural history.

This book is 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 - from novels and folktales to U.S. government reports and corporate advertisements - both reflects and influences our interactions with the natural world.

With twelve original essays that characterize truly international ecocriticisms, New International Voices in Ecocriticism presents a compendium of ecocritical approaches, including ecocritical theory, ecopoetics, ecocritical analyses of literary, cultural, and musical texts (especially those not commonly studied in mainstream ecocriticism), and new critical vistas on human-nonhuman relations, postcolonial subjects, material selves, gender, and queer ecologies. It develops new perspectives on literature, culture, and the environment. The essays, written by contributors from the United States, Canada, Germany, Turkey, Spain, China, India, and South Africa, cover novels, drama, autobiography, music, and poetry, mixing traditional and popular forms. Popular culture and the production and circulation of cultural imaginaries feature prominently in this volume—how people view their world and the manner in which they share their perspectives, including the way these perspectives challenge each other globally and locally. In this sense the book also probes borders, border transgression, and border permeability. By offering diverse ecocritical approaches, the essays affirm the significance and necessity of international perspectives in environmental humanities, and thus offer unique responses to environmental problems and that, in some sense, affect many beginning and established scholars.

A collection of thirteen original essays by leaders in the emerging field of ecocriticism,The Greening of Literary Scholarship is devoted to exploring new and previously neglected literatures, theories, and methods in environmental-literary scholarship. Each essay in this impressive collection challenges the notion that the study of environmental literature is separate from traditional concerns of criticism, and each applies ecocritical scholarship to literature not commonly explored in this context. New historicism, postcolonialism, deconstructionism, and feminist and Marxist theories are all utilized to evaluate and gain new insights into environmental literature; at the same time, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Upton Sinclair, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Susan Howe are studied from an ecocritical perspective. At its core, The Greening of Literary Scholarship offers a practical demonstration of how articulating traditional and environmental modes of literary scholarship can enrich the interpretation of literary texts and, most important, revitalize the larger fields of environmental and literary scholarship.