Customer Reviews

The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Blackwell Manifestos)

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This text, by an established eco-critic of literature, does a wonderful job surveying the whole of ecocriticism, and the environmental literature movement. From introducing major works and collections, to important key and pioneering figures, Buell provides the reader with a solid foundation of the different factions, philosophies, and agendas that are enmeshed under that one umbrella term.

He is careful to consider American, British, and other ecological works and scholars, showing how they work against and with each other in various ways.
One of the most helpful visuals he gives in understanding the diversity of this movement is his idea of two axes. Left to right axis has the following poles: ecocentrism & anthropocentric ethics. Top to bottom axis: health of physical environment & social welfare or interhuman equity. Eco-criticism, he continues, can land anywhere on this axis, giving an idea of the tensions and divergences of the critical stance as a whole.

Although this is a great "introductory" book, it also has a wonderful bibliography that I am using extensively to fuel my own research. As added bonuses this book is a smooth read (oh, such a relief in academia), has a great index, and even a somewhat useful glossary.

The Future Of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis And Literary Imagination is a scholarly summary of the distinct critical practices that constitute "ecocriticism" today. Written by one of the world's leading theorists, who traces the ecocritical movement to its roots in the 1970's and its coalescence in the 1990's, The Future Of Environmental Criticism Asks such bold questions as: Why has interest in environmental literary and cultural studies risen so rapidly in recent times? Can the emphasis upon preserving nature of earlier ecocriticism be successfully reconciled with later ecocritical issues of environmental justice? The Future Of Environmental Criticism draws from past and present reality to predict the directions in which future ecocritical movements will flow, and offers a positive-themed manifesto of means to balance differing agendas into a more unified, and therefore stronger movement.