Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment: Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment
About the Book Series
Since the dawn of human artistic and cultural expression, the natural world and our complex and often vexed relationships with the other-than-human have been essential themes in such expression. This series seeks to offer an encompassing approach to literary explorations of environmental experiences and ideas, reaching from the earliest known literatures to the twenty-first century and accounting for vernacular approaches throughout the world. In recent decades, it has become clear that highly localized, non-Western forms of literary expression and scholarly analysis have much to contribute to ecocritical understanding—such studies, as well as examinations of European and North American literatures, are encouraged. Comparative treatments of literary works from different cultures, cultural expression in various media (including literature and connections with visual and performing arts, ecocinema, music, videogames, and material culture), and interdisciplinary scholarly methodologies would be ideal contributions to the series. What are the lessons regarding human-animal kinship that can be gleaned from indigenous songs in Africa, Amazonia, Oceania, the Americas, and other regions of the world? Which discourses of toxicity in the urban centers of contemporary East Asia and the post-industrial brownscapes of Europe and America might gain traction as we seek to balance human and ecological health and robust economies? What are some of the Third World expressions of postcolonial ecocriticism, posthumanism, material ecocriticism, gender-based ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and other avant-garde trends? How do basic concepts such as "wilderness" or "animal rights" or "pollution" find expression in diverse environmental voices and become imbricated with questions of caste, class, gender, politics, and ethnicity? The global circulation of culturally diverse texts provides resources for understanding and engaging with the environmental crisis. This series aims to provide a home for projects demonstrating both traditional and experimental approaches in environmental literary studies.
Series Editors:
Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA
Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Previous Editors:
Matthew Wynn Sivils, Iowa State University, USA
The Environment in Sustainable American Studies: Powered by Nature
1st Edition
Edited
By Frank Mehring
July 20, 2026
The Environment in Sustainable American Studies offers a multifaceted exploration of the environment within American Studies, featuring contributions that scrutinize the intricate relationship between culture, power, and the environment. This book presents a cutting-edge exploration of the current ...
Ecomaterial Ambivalence in South and Southeast Asian Literary, Philosophical, and Cultural Narratives
1st Edition
By Chitra Sankaran
April 10, 2026
This volume provides a timely contribution to the ongoing conversation on the agency of matter in environmental humanities. The first book offering an important and relevant Asian perspective to this hitherto exclusively westcentric exchange, it focuses on one of the influential theoretical fields ...
Storying the Ecocatastrophe: Contemporary Narratives about the Environmental Collapse
1st Edition
Edited
By Helena Duffy, Katarina Leppänen
October 26, 2025
How do writers and artists represent the climate catastrophe so that their works stir audiences to political action or at least raise their environmental awareness without, however, appearing didactic? Storying the Ecocatastrophe attempts to answer this question while interrogating the potential of...
Reading the Environment: Olga Tokarczuk’s Fiction
1st Edition
By Dominika Oramus
September 03, 2025
Reading the Environment: Olga Tokarczuk’s Fiction aims at analysing the dynamics of reading fiction in the context of accelerating climate change. This volume proposes an environment-oriented model of reading and applies it to a well-defined corpus—all existing English translations of Olga ...
The Ecology of American Noir
1st Edition
By Katrina Younes
April 06, 2025
This volume investigates the relationship between the conventions of noir fiction and film and its sub-types in relation to environmental crises. Dr. Younes addresses questions that not only allow readers to (re)read early hardboiled literature and neo-noir films but also help identify a new ...
A Year of Real and Literary Birds
1st Edition
By Laura Godfrey
February 27, 2025
A Year of Real and Literary Birds is simultaneously an almanac of bird life, a work of interdisciplinary literary scholarship, and a chronicle of family life. The book paints an intimate portrait of a place and a diverse cast of authors by bringing to life the birds within landscapes both literary ...
The Unconscious in Literature: The Oedipus Complex, the Death Drive, and the Unsymbolic Void
1st Edition
By Yasunori Sugimura
January 31, 2025
This book aims to investigate the unconscious in literature using Freudian and Lacanian psychology. The works of Thomas Hardy, William Golding, and Iris Murdoch are discussed from Chapter 1 through to Chapter 8. Based on the argument in these chapters, this volume considers the environmental ...
Reading Madeleine L’Engle: Ecopsychology in Children’s and Adolescent Literature
1st Edition
By Heidi A. Lawrence
January 30, 2025
Using a critical lens derived from ecopsychology and its praxis, ecotherapy, this book explores the relationships Madeleine L’Engle develops for her characters in a selection of the novels from her three Time, Austin family, and O’Keefe family series as those relationships develop along a ...
The Ecopoetics of War
1st Edition
Edited
By Sylvain Belluc, Isabelle Brasme, Guillaume Tanguy
December 30, 2024
The Ecopoetics of War explores the interrelationality of human and nonhuman entities in the context of conflict, as recorded in literature and culture. This collection of essays demonstrates the specific and fertile role of literature in representations of war, as it foregrounds the manifold ...
Desertscapes in the Global South and Beyond: Anthropocene Naturecultures
1st Edition
Edited
By Sushila Shekhawat, Rayson K. Alex, Swarnalatha Rangarajan
December 18, 2024
Embracing a rich diversity of voices, this volume seeks to explore the different facets of Anthropocene naturecultures in the desert biomes of the Global South and beyond. Essays in this collection will articulate issues of desertification, indigeneity and re-inhabitation in narratives that thread ...
(Eco)Anxiety in Nuclear Holocaust Fiction and Climate Fiction: Doomsday Clock Narratives
1st Edition
By Dominika Oramus
November 28, 2024
(Eco)Anxiety in Nuclear Holocaust Fiction and Climate Fiction: Doomsday Clock Narratives demonstrates that disaster fiction— nuclear holocaust and climate change alike— allows us to unearth and anatomise contemporary psychodynamics and enables us to identify pretraumatic stress as the common ...
Decolonial Animal Ethics in Linda Hogan’s Poetry and Prose: Towards Interspecies Thriving
1st Edition
By Małgorzata Poks
November 28, 2024
Decolonial Animal Ethics in Linda Hogan’s Poetry and Prose is a plea for an urgent redefinition of human-animal relations on the basis of a nonanthropocentric animal ethic embraced by premodern Indigenous communities but depreciated by coloniality. Without decolonial revisions of animal ...