Global Literature and the Environment

Matthew Whittle is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent, UK. He is the author of Post-War British Literature and the “End of Empire” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).Jade Munslow Ong is Professor of World Literatures in English at the University of Salford, UK. She is author of Olive Schreiner and African Modernism: Allegory, Empire and Postcolonial Writing (Routledge, 2018).

• IntroductionChapter One: EarthChapter Two: WaterChapter Three: AirChapter Four: LifeConclusionGlossary of Key TermsSuggested Further ReadingIndex

"Global Literature and the Environment is a valuable addition to a growing body of scholarship on the role literature and literary criticism might play in addressing the major environmental challenges of our times. Covering a suitably wide range of literary works and provocatively insisting on the instrumentality rather than singularity of literature, the authors adopt a nuanced eco-materialist approach that avoids the rhetorical excesses of elemental ecocriticism (and other versions of new materialism) and the ideological pieties of world-ecology (and other versions of eco-Marxism). Though it might ruffle a few feathers along the way, the book should appeal to postcolonial and environmental humanities scholars alike, and to all those committed to the continuing pursuit of social and ecological justice in an unevenly developed world."- Graham Huggan, Professor of Postcolonial and Commonwealth Literatures, Leeds, UK. Co-author of Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment"Matthew Whittle's and Jade Munslow Ong's Global Literature and the Environment spans continents in terms of the diverse materialities of soil, oil, ice, air, and life and yet the book brings them together in a brilliant array of textual analyses featuring environmental justice and ecological devastation.The selection of authors and genres is impressive; the literary insights formidable. I highly recommend this book to anyone working or studying in the environmental humanities, comparative literature, Anglophone literature, and environmental justice studies. The book is informative, well-written, beautifully researched, and a significant contribution to our global understanding of the Anthropocene. It is also eminently readable even as it portrays the sheer brutality of extractivist cultures to our planet and its peoples."- Heather I. Sullivan, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Trinity University, US