Title: Literature and the Environment: Critical and Primary Sources ed. by Stephanie LeMenager and Teresa Shewry (review)
Abstract: Reviewed by: Literature and the Environment: Critical and Primary Sources ed. by Stephanie LeMenager and Teresa Shewry Timothy Clark Literature and the Environment: Critical and Primary Sources. Ed. by Stephanie LeMenager and Teresa Shewry. Vol. i: Field Genealogies: Networks and Trajectories; vol. ii: Why Literature? Literature as Ecological Force; vol. iii: Interdisciplinary Conversations: From Ecocriticism to Posthumanities; vol. iv: Field Contexts. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2021. xvi+301 pp (vol. i); viii+373 pp. (vol. ii); vii+290 pp. (vol. iii); vi+307 pp. (vol. iv). £650; $890 (set). ISBN 978–1–3500–2517–2 (vol. i); 978–1–3500–2557–8 (vol. ii); 978– 1–3500–2590–5 (vol. iii); 978–1–3500–2628–5 (vol. iv); 978–1–3500–2631–5 (set). Stephanie LeMenager and Teresa Shewry have created a useful anthology in Bloomsbury’s ‘Critical and Primary Sources’ series, aimed at students working on literature and the environment (ecocriticism) and in fields of the environmental humanities more widely. As the price of £650 must suggest, this is a resource for libraries. It is mainly a considered selection of secondary texts, with Volume ii giving a 152-page appendix of selected primary ones, perhaps less necessarily. If the collection could later become an electronic resource, its usefulness would be very much enhanced. The comprehensive selection of secondary texts covers the main issues in environmental criticism in its swift emergence and development since the late twentieth century: toxic discourse, climate change, the controversies over the meaning and naming of an ‘Anthropocene’, postcolonial ecocriticism, queer ecocriticism, feminism and the environment, new materialist arguments on fully acknowledging non-human agency, the human/animal distinction, the claims of non-human life, and the ethics of food. Questions of aesthetics and the challenge posed by environmental questions to inherited modes of representation also receive attention. Environmental criticism has always had a strong interdisciplinary element— after all, its key term, ‘the environment’, means, strictly, everything. The division of this project into four separately titled volumes reflects an aim to offer some meta-critical guidance to an intellectual realm that refuses facile boundaries, with a substantial introduction to Volume 1 and shorter introductions to the other three. These can seem slightly forced and will probably be of less interest to student readers than to a few more specialist researchers in the field or fields. Seminar leaders and lecturers are unlikely to use all or any of the volumes as a textbook to be read from cover to cover, usually preferring to compile their own lists of essential or recommended reading. However, these volumes offer them a useful short cut to specific key texts at various points in a course. [End Page 361] A certain vagueness in the wording of the titles of the four volumes (‘conversations’, ‘trajectories’, ‘contexts’) reflects the difficulty of attempting a tidy overview of so broad and dispersed a topic as ‘the environment’. The further division of each volume into focused subjects will, however, guide students embarking on a project—that in Volume iii, for instance, on conversations with the ‘Natural Sciences: Consilience to Transcorporality’, or ‘Exemplary Readings’ in Volume i. This takes up issues of aesthetic representation and genre more directly than must often be the case with a field focused mostly on material histories and cultural politics. Readers coming from a mainly literary background will be particularly engaged by the Media Studies subsection, ‘From Cinema to Critical Infrastructure’ (the latter meaning issues of energy use by electronic media). A mild feeling of the ad hoc can enter into the project at times. The list of people acknowledged for advice exemplifies the rather USA-centric culture of the collection, and rather many of the papers are themselves introductions excerpted from the context of authors presenting their own volumes, so that a student will often be reading introductory summaries of papers that actually appeared elsewhere. All the same, even that aspect still works as a useful guide to other papers a reader might want to pursue. One contribution refers to ‘the photograph at left’ which appeared only in the original publication. Several of the texts are already canonical in the environmental humanities (Donna Haraway’s ‘Situated Knowledges...
Publication Year: 2023
Publication Date: 2023-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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