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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.
Foreword by Gillen D’Arcy Wood
Editor's introduction
PART I: Discourses of sustainability
1 The millers’ tales: sustainability, the arts and the watermill – Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Howard Thomas and Richard Marggraf Turley
2 Sustenance from the past: precedents to sustainability in nineteenth-century literature and culture – John Parham
3 Deep sustainability: ecopoetics, enjoyment and ecstatic hospitality – Kate Rigby
4 Recycling materials, recycling lives: cardboard publishers in Latin America – Lucy Bell
5 Sustainability after extinction: on last animals and future bison – Joshua Schuster
6 The twilight of the Anthropocene: sustaining literature – Claire Colebrook
PART II: Reading sustainability
7 Collapse, resilience, stability and sustainability in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy – Dana Phillips
8 ‘The shadow of the future made all the difference’: sustainability in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy – Chris Pak
9 The unsustainable aesthetics of sustainability: the sense of an ending in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods – Adeline Johns-Putra
10 A modest proposal for a less natural lifestyle: the paradoxes of sustainability and Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island – Hannes Bergthaller
11 Jorie Graham’s Sea Change: the poetics of sustainability and the politics of what we’re sustaining – Matthew Griffiths
12 Circles unrounded: sustainability, subject and necessity in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi – Louise Squire
Index