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Book Review
| The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment. Edited by Steven Rosendale. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. xxix + 275 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $39.95, paper $19.95.
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| The Greening of Literary Scholarship explores a variety of literatures, critical methodologies, and literary theories previously neglected in the field of ecocriticism, and demonstrates fruitful new directions for the future of the discipline. Graduate students and seasoned scholars alike will find this comprehensive collection of thirteen original essays from leading ecocritics a useful and informative tool for their own ecocritical studies and scholarship. While ecocritics generally have tended to define their field in opposition to traditional literary studies, each author in this collection challenges such notions of mutual exclusivity and demonstrates promising new approaches for increasing the connectivity between contemporary literary theory, classical modes of literary scholarship, and the ecocritical enterprise. Readers will benefit from the wide variety of approaches taken in The Greening of Literary Scholarship, ranging from new historicism, postcolonialism, deconstructionism, and poststructuralism, to feminist, Marxist, and psychoanalytic theory, as well as modes of recovery scholarship performed by textual editors. |
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Taken as a whole, this collection of essays promises to enlarge the practice of ecocriticism and further establish its relevancy in the larger field of literary studies. As editor Steven Rosendale notes, "An emphasis on mutually enriching dialogue between environmental criticism and the anthropocentric concerns of established literatures and critical perspectives is a keynote of each essay in this volume" (p. xvii). Each author represented in the collection explores the value of her or his particular method to both, the ecocritical project and the larger humanistic disciplines, while also applying that approach to a specific text, or group of texts. In "Saving All the Pieces," for example, Michael P. Branch convincingly demonstrates the need for ecocritics to enlarge the canon of environmental literature to include a wider spectrum of pre-Thoreauvian texts and offers five examples of ecocritical textual editing which have significantly altered our understanding of early "American" responses to the New World. Similarly, Gordon Sayre and Alison Byerly offer insightful explorations of colonial promotional narratives and nineteenth century British panoramas, enlarging the scope of green literary studies to include previously marginalized texts and cultural productions. Steven Rosendale successfully unites red and green concerns in his treatment of The Jungle, evidencing a powerful approach to uniting the humanistic and class-oriented concerns of Marxist criticism with the ecocentric focus of literary ecologists. In a like manner, James Tarter fuses the often disparate concerns of multi-culturalism and ecocriticism through an exploration of place in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, while Andrea Blair and Eleanor Hersey offer exciting new approaches for eco-feminists. Other authors, such as Helena Feder, Rick Van Noy, Aaron Dunckel, and James Kirwan, reconnect contemporary literary theory and ecocriticism with Romantic notions of the sublime, uses of apostrophe, and the problematics of representation. |
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For literary scholars who wish to become acquainted with ecocritical approaches to literature, or who would like to explore the novel directions in which this emergent field of literary studies is moving, The Greening of Literary Scholarship offers a wide variety of useful examples and approaches. |
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Reviewed by Corey Lewis, a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Nevada—Reno's Literature and Environment Program. He has published on interdisciplinary ecocritical methodologies, and instructs for the Great Basin Institute, an interdisciplinary, field studies program at UNR. |
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