Description:
This volume showcases the explosive expansion of environmental criticism, which is transforming three areas of broad interest in contemporary literary and cultural studies: science, history, and scale. Visiting texts from the medieval period through the twenty-first century, it brings into focus recent ecocritical concern for the long durations through which environmental imaginations have been shaped. Contributors address environmental institutions and imaginations that complicate conventional rubrics such as the national, local, and global, drawing on both the sciences and the humanities to engage ecological processes such as global climate change, peak oil production, nuclear proliferation, and food scarcity.