Writing for an endangered world : literature, culture, and environment in the U.S. and beyond

The environmental imagination does not stop short at the edge of the woods. Nor should our understanding of it, as Lawrence Buell makes powerfully clear in his new book that aims to reshape the field of literature and environmental studies. Emphasizing the influence of the physical environment on individual and collective perception, his book thus provides the theoretical underpinnings for an ecocriticism now reaching full power, and does so in remarkably clear and concrete ways. Writing for an Endangered World offers a conception of the physical environment--whether built or natural--as simultaneously found and constructed, and treats imaginative representations of it as acts of both discovery and invention. A number of the chapters develop this idea through parallel studies of figures identified with either "natural" or urban settings: John Muir and Jane Addams; Aldo Leopold and William Faulkner; Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Dreiser; Wendell Berry and Gwendolyn Brooks. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, but ranging freely across national borders, his book reimagines city and country as a single complex landscape. (20011101) "Emphasizing the influence of the physical environment on individual and collective perception, Buell's book provides the theoretical underpinnings for an eco-criticism now reaching full power. Writing for an Endangered World offers a conception of the physical environment - whether built or natural - as simultaneously found and constructed, and treats imaginative representations of it as acts of both discovery and invention. A number of the chapters develop this idea through parallel studies of figures identified with either "natural" or urban settings: John Muir and Jane Addams; Aldo Leopold and William Faulkner; Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Dreiser; Wendell Berry and Gwendolyn Brooks. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, but ranging freely across national borders, Buell reimagines city and country as a single complex landscape."--BOOK JACKET. Offers a conception of the physical environment--whether built or natural--as simultaneously found and constructed, and treats imaginative representations of it as acts of both discovery and invention. A number of the chapters develop this idea through parallel studies of figures identified with either "natural" or urban settings: John Muir and Jane Addams; Aldo Leopold and William Faulkner; Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Dreiser; Wendell Berry and Gwendolyn Brooks. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, but ranging freely across national borders, this book reimagines city and country as a single complex landscape Contents......Page 8 Introduction......Page 12 1. Toxic Discourse......Page 41 2. The Place of Place......Page 66 3. Flâneur’s Progress: Reinhabiting the City......Page 95 4. Discourses of Determinism......Page 140 5. Modernization and the Claims of the Natural World: Faulkner and Leopold ......Page 181 6. Global Commons as Resource and as Icon: Imagining Oceans and Whales......Page 207 7. The Misery of Beasts and Humans: Nonanthropocentric Ethics versus Environmental Justice......Page 235 8. Watershed Aesthetics......Page 254 Notes......Page 278 Acknowledgments......Page 352 Index......Page 356