The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism provides a broad survey of the longstanding relationship between literature and the environment. The moment for such an offering is opportune in many respects: multiple environmental crises are increasingly inescapable at both transnational and local levels; the role of the humanities in addition to technology and politics is increasingly recognized as central for exploring and finding solutions; and the subject of ecocriticism has reached a kind of critical mass, both within its Anglo-American heartlands and beyond.

From its origins in the study of American Nature Writing and British Romanticism, ecocriticism has developed along numerous theoretical, historical, cultural and geographical axes, the most contemporary and exciting of which will be represented in the Handbook. The contributors include eminent founders of the field, including Cheryll Glotfelty and Jonathan Bate, a number of key "second-wave" ecocritics, and the best up-and-coming scholars. Topics covered include: Green Shakespeare-the Bard's subversive uses of the pastoral; John Clare's sacred relationship with the land; Thoreau's profound political passion; the natural landscape as symbol of postcolonial resistance in works by Lessing, Naipaul, and Coetzee; the relation between feminism and environmentalism; language and the concept of biosemiotics; and concerns over pollution and toxicity in films like Erin Brockovitch, Michael Clayton, and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

Greg Garrard's profile page

Greg Garrard is the author of Ecocriticism (Routledge 2004), as well as numerous essays and articles. Currently, he is FCCS Sustainability Professor at the University of British Columbia, a National Teaching Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy, and a founding member and former Chair of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.