The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment

Offers an overview of American environmental literature across genres and time periods, introducing readers to a range of ecocritical methodologies.

This book offers a broad overview of American environmental literature and criticism. Demonstrating links between ecocriticism and fields such as Black feminism, food studies, Latinx studies, Indigenous studies, and queer theory, it reveals the persistent relevance of literary methods within the interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities.This Companion offers a capacious overview of American environmental literature and criticism. Tracing environmental literatures from the gates of the Manzanar War Relocation Camp in California to the island of St. Croix, from the notebooks of eighteenth-century naturalists to the practices of contemporary activists, this book offers readers a broad, multimedia definition of 'literature', a transnational, settler colonial comprehension of America, and a more-than-green definition of 'environment'. Demonstrating links between ecocriticism and such fields as Black feminism, food studies, decolonial activism, Latinx studies, Indigenous studies, queer theory, and carceral studies, the volume reveals the persistent relevance of literary methods within the increasingly interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities, while also modeling practices of literary reading shaped by this interdisciplinary turn. The result is a volume that will prove indispensable both to students seeking an overview of American environmental literature/criticism and to established scholars seeking new approaches to the field.