The Ecocriticism Reader 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 both reflects and influences our interactions with the natural world.
An introduction to the field as well as a source book, The Ecocriticism Reader defines 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 Reader is an illuminating entree into a field of study fully engaged with our most pressing contemporary problem--the global environmental crisis.
HAROLD FROMM lives in Tucson and is University Associate in English at the University of Arizona as well as a member of the university’s Institute of the Environment. He is the author of The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness and Academic Capitalism and Literary Value. His writings have appeared in a wide range of journals and he is a regular contributor to the Hudson Review.
MICHAEL P. BRANCH, associate professor of literature and environment at the University of Nevada, Reno, is cofounder and past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and book review editor of the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. The author of numerous articles and reviews, he is also editor of John Muir's Last Journey: South to the Amazon and East to Africa and co-editor of The Height of Our Mountains: Nature Writing from Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley, Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment, and The ISLE Reader (Georgia).
DAVID MAZEL is an assistant professor of English at Adams State College in Alamosa, Colorado, and editor of Mountaineering Women: Stories by Early Climbers.