Louise Westling has been teaching in the English Department at the University of Oregon since 1977. She served as a visiting professor at the University of Tübingen and a Fulbright Professor at the University of Heidelberg, and as a president and founding member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. She is the author of The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction (1996), and of the forthcoming The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (2013).

• Introduction Louise Westling; Part I. Foundations: 1. Pastoral, anti-pastoral, and post-pastoral Terry Gifford; 2. The green otherworlds of early medieval literature Alfred Siewers; 3. 'Mapping by words': the politics of land in Native American literature Shari Huhndorf; Part II. Theories: 4. Ecocritical theory: romantic roots and impulses from twentieth-century European thinkers Axel Goodbody; 5. Nature, post nature Timothy Clark; 6. Violent affinities: sex, gender, and species in Cereus Blooms at Night Catriona Sandilands; 7. The lure of the wilderness Leo Mellor; Part III. Interdisciplinary Engagements: 8. 'Tongues I'll hang on every tree': biosemiotics and the Book of Nature Wendy Wheeler; 9. Sauntering along the border: Thoreau, Nabhan, and food politics Janet Fiskio; 10. Animal studies, literary animals, and Yann Martel's Life of Pi Sarah McFarland; Part IV. Major Directions: 11. Environmental justice, cosmopolitics, and climate change Joni Adamson; 12. Systems and secrecy: postcolonial ecocriticism and Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt; 13. Environmental crises and East Asian literatures: uncertain presents and futures Karen Thornber; 14. Confronting catastrophe: ecocriticism in a warming world Kate Rigby; 15. Ecocinema and the wildlife film Stephen Rust.

'… provides a wide-ranging overview of the first three decades of ecocriticism, gives both a thorough introduction of the field to the novice, as well as suggestions for those more familiar with the field on where ecocriticism is going next. Consequently, it is an important contribution to the development of the field, and a testimony to its growing importance as a mode of analysis.' Astrid Bracke, English Studies