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
Ecomaterial Ambivalence in South and Southeast Asian Literary, Philosophical, and Cultural Narratives
1st Edition
By Chitra Sankaran
April 08, 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Reading Contemporary Environmental Justice: Narratives from Kerala
1st Edition
By R. Sreejith Varma
November 28, 2024
This volume investigates 11 contemporary environmental justice narratives from Kerala, the south-western state in India. Introducing a detailed review of environmental literature in Malayalam, the selected eco-narratives are presented through two key literary genres: life narratives and novels, ...
The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction
1st Edition
By Maria Lindgren Leavenworth
November 28, 2024
The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction explores the ways in which the Arctic is imagined and what function it is made to serve in a selection of speculative fictions: non-mimetic works that start from the implied question "What if?" Spanning slightly more than two centuries of speculative ...
Oil and Modern World Dramas: From Petro-Mania to Petro-Melancholia
1st Edition
By Alireza Fakhrkonandeh
October 09, 2024
The first to focus on the (re-)presentations of oil in dramatic literature, theatre, and performance, Oil and Modern World Dramas is a pioneering volume in the emerging field of Oil Literatures and Cultures, and the more established field of World Literatures. Through close analysis, Fakhrkonandeh ...
Contagion Narratives: The Society, Culture and Ecology of the Global South
1st Edition
Edited
By R. Sreejith Varma, Ajanta Sircar
August 26, 2024
This volume is a collection of ten essays that direct their gaze to the unfolding of contagions in the non-classical contexts of Asia and Africa. Or, to borrow from the title of one of Partha Chatterjee’s books, they are reflections on the pandemic in most of the world. Featuring many scholars (of ...
Nuclear Cultures: Irradiated Subjects, Aesthetics and Planetary Precarity
1st Edition
By Pramod K. Nayar
August 26, 2024
Nuclear Cultures: Irradiated Subjects, Aesthetics and Planetary Precarity aims to develop the field of nuclear humanities and the powerful ability of literary and cultural representations of science and catastrophe to shape the meaning of historic events. Examining multiple discourses and textual ...