Literature and Sustainability

This 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. In today’s 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 term whose meaning can be sustained? While much is written on sustainability across various domains, it has received surprisingly less attention from literary scholarship, including from the burgeoning field of ecocriticism. One reason for this is that sustainability is often discussed in the context of broader issues such as food security or climate change. Another is the term’s contested usage, for example in the disparity between its potential for safeguarding planetary diversity – a concern of many ecocritics – and its vulnerability to cooption within a neoliberal paradigm, whereby what seems mainly to be sustained is the possibility for business-as-usual. Sustainability is a profoundly problematic term. Yet, this in itself should invite literary commentary; and indeed, such a response is more recently emerging. This collection represents the contributions of leading and upcoming scholars to the question of how literary scholarship might engage with the sustainability debate. The essays in this book explore a range of approaches, from applying tools of literary enquiry in order to interrogate sustainability’s paradoxes, to investigating the ways in which literature envisages sustainability or plays out its tropes. For academic researchers and advanced students in environmental literary studies, this book offers a critical approach to sustainability. 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 today’s 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 sustainability’s 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.