The environmental imagination does not stop short at the edge of the woods. Nor should our understanding of it, as Lawrence Buell makes powerfully clear in his new book that aims to reshape the field of literature and environmental studies. Emphasizing the influence of the physical environment on individual and collective perception, his book thus provides the theoretical underpinnings for an ecocriticism now reaching full power, and does so in remarkably clear and concrete ways.

Writing for an Endangered World offers a conception of the physical environment--whether built or natural--as simultaneously found and constructed, and treats imaginative representations of it as acts of both discovery and invention. A number of the chapters develop this idea through parallel studies of figures identified with either "natural" or urban settings: John Muir and Jane Addams; Aldo Leopold and William Faulkner; Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Dreiser; Wendell Berry and Gwendolyn Brooks. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, but ranging freely across national borders, his book reimagines city and country as a single complex landscape.

About the Author
Lawrence Buell is Powell M. Cabot Research Professor of American Literature at Harvard University.

Reviews
Author of the widely influential The Environmental Imagination, Buell is a major figure in contemporary ecocriticism. Here, in broadening the scope of his earlier book, Buell blurs the usual distinction between natural and built environments. Exploring how a variety of texts imagine urban, rural, ocean, and desert places, he convincingly argues that literary imagination is powerfully shaped by--and shapes--a single, complex environment that is both found and constructed...Buell's book is important: it points ecocriticism in profoundly new and welcome directions. -- W. Conlogue * Choice *


Awards
Winner of John G. Cawelti Award 2002. Nominated for Pulitzer Prizes 2002 and James Russell Lowell Prize 2001 and Harold and Margaret Sprout Award 2002 and Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize 2002 and Francis Parkman Prize 2002 and J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize 2002 and Christian Gauss Award 2002 and Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize 2003 and Lynton Keith Caldwell Award 2003.



Book Information
ISBN 9780674012325
Author Lawrence Buell
Format Paperback
Page Count 384
Imprint The Belknap Press
Publisher Harvard University Press
Weight(grams) 499g
Dimensions(mm) 225mm * 144mm * 23mm