Books about the natural world in literature
Below are some examples of books in the University Libraries about depictions of the natural world in literature. More are available, focusing on different literary periods or movements, or the literature of different peoples. You can search for them using the tips below, or contact a librarian for assistance.
Critical Insights: Nature and the Environment by
Edited by Scott Slovic, Professor of Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno, this volume in the Critical Insights series addresses the themes of nature and the environment in literature through a diverse set of texts and through multiple methodologies. For readers who are studying the themes for the first time, a four essays survey the critical conversation regarding the theme, explore its cultural and historical contexts, and offer close and comparative readings of key texts containing the theme. Readers seeking a deeper understanding of the themes can then move on to other essays that explore them in depth through a variety of critical approaches. Classic works discussed include Walden, Call of the Wild, O Pioneers , The Old Man and the Sea, and selections from the poetry of William Wordsworth, while contemporary works include and the earth did not devour him, Desert Solitaire, Prodigal Summer. Among the contributors are Robert Bernard Hass, Richard J. Schneider, Ashton Nichols, Brian Railsback, Priscilla Leder, and Barbara J. Cook."
Call Number: ONLINEPublication Date: 2012
American Earth: Environmental Writing since Thoreau (LOA #182) by
As America and the world grapple with the consequences of global environmental change, writer and activist Bill McKibben offers this unprecedented, provocative, and timely anthology, gathering the best and most significant American environmental writing from the last two centuries. Classics of the environmental imagination'the essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson's Silent Spring?are set against the inspiring story of an emerging activist movement, as revealed by newly uncovered reports of pioneering campaigns for conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches. Here are some of America's greatest and most impassioned writers, taking a turn toward nature and recognizing the fragility of our situation on earth and the urgency of the search for a sustainable way of life. Thought-provoking essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of ?nature? join ecologists? memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species. The anthology includes a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history, as well as an 80-page color portfolio of illustrations.
Call Number: Bracken Library, General Collection PS169.E25 A44 2008Publication Date: 2008
Dark Nature by
In The Ecological Thought, eco-philosopher Timothy Morton has argued for the inclusion of "dark ecology" in our thinking about nature. Dark ecology, he argues, puts hesitation, uncertainty, irony, and thoughtfulness back into ecological thinking." The ecological thought, he says, should include "negativity and irony, ugliness and horror." Focusing on this concept of "dark ecology" and its invitation to add an anti-pastoral perspective to ecocriticism, this collection of essays on American literature and culture offers examples of how a vision of nature's darker side can create a fuller understanding of humanity's relation to nature. Included are essays on canonical American literature, on new voices in American literature, and on non-print American media. This is the first collection of essays applying the "dark ecology" principle to American literature.
Call Number: Bracken Library, General Collection PS169.E25 D37 2016Publication Date: 2016
Ecocritical Shakespeare by
Can reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare contribute to the health of the planet? To what degree are Shakespeare's plays anthropocentric or ecocentric? What is the connection between the literary and the real when it comes to ecological conduct? This collection, engages with these pressing questions surrounding ecocritical Shakespeare, in order to provide a better understanding of where and how ecocritical readings should be situated. The volume combines multiple critical perspectives, juxtaposing historicism and presentism, as well as considering ecofeminism and pedagogy; and addresses such topics as early modern flora and fauna, and the neglected areas of early modern marine ecology and oceanography. Concluding with an assessment of the challenges-and necessities-of teaching Shakespeare ecocritically, Ecocritical Shakespeare not only broadens the implications of ecocriticism in early modern studies, but represents an important contribution to this growing field.
Call Number: Bracken Library, General Collection PR3039 .E26 2011Publication Date: 2011
Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell by
The focus of this study is the perception of nature in the language of poetry and the languages of natural philosophy, technology, theology, and global exploration, primarily in seventeenth-century England. Its premise is that language and the perception of nature vitally affect each other and that seventeenth-century poets, primarily John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan, but also Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Traherne, Anne Finch, and others, responded to experimental proto-science and new technology in ways that we now call 'ecological' - concerned with watersheds and habitats and the lives of all creatures. It provides close readings of works by these poets in the contexts of natural history, philosophy, and theology as well as technology and land use, showing how they responded to what are currently considered ecological issues: deforestation, mining, air pollution, drainage of wetlands, destruction of habitats, the sentience and intelligence of animals, overbuilding, global commerce, the politics of land use, and relations between social justice and justice towards the other-than-human world. In this important book, Diane McColley demonstrates the language of poetry, the language of responsible science, and the language of moral and political philosophy all to be necessary parts of public discourse.
Call Number: Bracken Library, General Collection PR545.S33 M33 2007Publication Date: 2007
Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene by
In the first book devoted exclusively to the ecopoetics of the twenty-first century, Lynn Keller examines poetry of what she terms the "self-conscious Anthropocene," a period in which there is widespread awareness of the scale and severity of human effects on the planet. Recomposing Ecopoetics analyzes work written since the year 2000 by thirteen North American poets--including Evelyn Reilly, Juliana Spahr, Ed Roberson, and Jena Osman--all of whom push the bounds of literary convention as they seek forms and language adequate to complex environmental problems. Drawing as often on linguistic experimentalism as on traditional literary resources, these poets respond to environments transformed by people and take "nature" to be a far more inclusive and culturally imbricated category than conventional nature poetry does. This interdisciplinary study not only brings cutting-edge work in ecocriticism to bear on a diverse archive of contemporary environmental poetry; it also offers the environmental humanities new ways to understand the cultural and affective dimensions of the Anthropocene.
Call Number: Bracken Library, General Collection PN98.E36 K45 2017Publication Date: 2018
Writing the Forest in Early Modern England by
In Writing the Forest in Early Modern England: A Sylvan Pastoral Nation, Jeffrey S. Theis focuses on pastoral Literary Studies in early modern England as an emerging form of nature writing. In particular, Theis analyzes what happens when pastoral writing is set in forests-what he terms sylvan pastoral. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, forests and woodlands played an instrumental role in the formation of individual and national identities in England. Although environmentalism as we know it did not yet exist, persistent fears of timber shortages led to a larger anxiety about the status of forests. Perhaps more important, forests were dynamic and contested sites of largely undeveloped spaces where the poor would migrate in a time of rising population when land became scarce. And in addition to being a place where the poor would go, the forest also was a playground for monarchs and aristocrats where they indulged in the symbolically rich sport of hunting. Conventional pastoral Literary Studies, then, transforms when writers use it to represent and define forests and the multiple ways in which English society saw these places. In exploring these themes, authors expose national concerns regarding deforestation and forest law and present views relating to land ownership, nationhood, and the individual's relationship to nature. Of particular interest are the ways in which cultures turn confusing spaces into known places and how this process is shaped by nature, history, gender, and class. Theis examines the playing out of these issues in familiar works by Shakespeare, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and As You Like It, Andrew Marvell's "Upon Appleton House," John Milton's Mask and Paradise Lost, as well as in lesser known prose works of the English Revolution, such as James Howell's Dendrologia and John Evelyn's Sylva. As a unique ecocritical study of forests in early modern English Literary Studies, Writing the Forest makes an important contribution to the growing field of the history of environmentalism, and will be of interest to those working in literary and cultural history as well as philosophers concerned with nature and space theory.
Call Number: Bracken Library, General Collection PR438.E39 T47 2009Publication Date: 2005
Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment by
This study examines how postcolonial landscapes and environmental issues are represented in fiction. Wright creates a provocative discourse in which the fields of postcolonial theory and ecocriticism are brought together. Laura Wright explores the changes brought by colonialism and globalization as depicted in an array of international works of fiction in four thematically arranged chapters. She looks first at two traditional oral histories retold in modern novels, Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness (South Africa) and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood (Kenya), that deal with the potentially devastating effects of development, particularly through deforestation and the replacement of native flora with European varieties. Wright then uses J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (South Africa), Yann Martel's Life of Pi (India and Canada), and Joy Williams's The Quick and the Dead (United States) to explore the use of animals as metaphors for subjugated groups of individuals. The third chapter deals with India's water crisis via Arundhati Roy's activism and her novel, The God of Small Things. Finally, Wright looks at three novels--Flora Nwapa's Efuru (Nigeria), Keri Hulme's The Bone People (New Zealand), and Sindiwe Magona's Mother to Mother (South Africa)--that depict women's relationships to the land from which they have been dispossessed. Throughout Wilderness into Civilized Shapes, Wright rearticulates questions about the role of the writer of fiction as environmental activist and spokesperson, the connections between animal ethics and environmental responsibility, and the potential perpetuation of a neocolonial framework founded on western commodification and resource-based imperialism.
Call Number: General Collection, General Collection PR9084 .W75 2010Publication Date: 2010
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