TY - BOOK AU - Buell,Lawrence TI - Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond SN - 9780674029057 AV - PS169.E25 B84 2001eb U1 - 810.9/355 23 PY - 2009///] CY - Cambridge, MA : PB - Harvard University Press, KW - American literature KW - History and criticism KW - Criticism KW - American KW - General KW - Ecology in literature KW - English literature KW - Environmental policy in literature KW - Environmental protection in literature KW - Landscapes in literature KW - Littérature américaine KW - Histoire et critique KW - Littérature anglaise KW - Nature conservation in literature KW - Nature in literature KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General KW - bisacsh N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Introduction --; 1. Toxic Discourse --; 2. The Place of Place --; 3. Flâneur’s Progress: Reinhabiting the City --; 4. Discourses of Determinism --; 5. Modernization and the Claims of the Natural World: Faulkner and Leopold --; 6. Global Commons as Resource and as Icon: Imagining Oceans and Whales --; 7. The Misery of Beasts and Humans: Nonanthropocentric Ethics versus Environmental Justice --; 8. Watershed Aesthetics --; Notes --; Acknowledgments --; Index; restricted access N2 - 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.Reviews of this book: Author of the widely influential The Environmental Imagination, Buell is a major figure in contemporary ecocriticism. Here, in broadening the scope of his earlier book, Buell blurs the usual distinction between natural and built environments. Exploring how a variety of texts imagine urban, rural, ocean, and desert places, he convincingly argues that literary imagination is powerfully shaped by--and shapes--a single, complex environment that is both found and constructed.Buell's book is important: it points ecocriticism in profoundly new and welcome directions.--W. Conlogue, Choice UR - https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674029057 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780674029057 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780674029057/original ER -