Literature and sustainability: Concept, text and culture [Paperback]

How might literary scholarship engage with the sustainability debate? Aimed at research scholars and advanced students in literary and environmental studies, this collection brings together twelve essays by leading and up-coming scholars on the theme of literature and sustainability. In todays sociopolitical world, sustainability has become a ubiquitous term, yet one potentially driven to near meaninglessness by the extent of its usage. While much has been written on sustainability in various domains, this volume sets out to foreground the contributions literary scholarship might make to notions of sustainability, both as an idea with a particular history and as an attempt to reconceptualise the way we live. Essays in this volume take a range of approaches, using the tools of literary analysis to interrogate sustainabilitys various paradoxes and to examine how literature in its various forms might envisage notions of sustainability.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

GBThis edited collection brings together twelve essays by leading and upcoming scholars, the aim of which is to contribute critically to conceptions of sustainability from the standpoint of environmental literary scholarship. The book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in ecocriticism and related fields.

Adeline Johns-Putra is Professor and Head of the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University Malaysia

John Parham was Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Worcester

Louise Squire is an Independent Scholar

In todays sociopolitical world, sustainability has become a ubiquitous term. It is also an intriguing term, incorporating both an immensity of vision and the minutiae of day-to-day life. But its slipperiness is manifest; does it mean the same thing to a farmer, a conservationist, a politician or a multinational cooperation? Is sustainability a telã"