Literature and sustainability : : concept, text and culture / / edited by Adeline Johns-Putra, John Parham and Louise Squire.

• Author: Johns-Putra, Adeline
• TeilnehmendeR: Squire, Louise,; Parham, John,; Johns-Putra, Adeline, 1973-
• Place / Publishing House: Manchester, UK : : Manchester University Press,, 2017.; ©2017
• Year of Publication: 2017
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (xvii, 253 pages) :; illustrations; digital file(s).

Sustainability has become a key socio-political issue over recent years. However, whilst the literary-critical community has advanced enthusiastically on an exciting range of environmentally-based analyses (most obviously through the work of ecocriticism), its response specifically to sustainability—as an attempt to reconceptualise the way we live, as an idea with a particular history, and as a ubiquitous term driven through over-use to near meaninglessness—has been extremely limited. The basic idea of the volume is to make a start on filling this gap. Split into four sections: Historicising sustainability, Discourses of sustainability, The sustainability of literature, Sustainability in literature – it has some very good contributors, and starts off with an introduction about the history of the term, looks at its beginnings in the C19th, and goes onto show how contemporary authors are dealing with it including Jeanette Winterson, Michel Houellebecq, Margaret Atwood and Amitav Ghosh.

Table of Contents

The millers' tales: sustainability, the arts and the watermill / Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Howard Thomas and Richard Marggraf Turley -- Sustenance from the past: precedents to sustainability in nineteenth-century literature and culture / John Parham -- Deep sustainability: ecopoetics, enjoyment and ecstatic hospitality / Kate Rigby -- Recycling materials, recycling lives: cardboard publishers in Latin America / Lucy Bell -- Sustainability after extinction: on last animals and future bison / Joshua Schuster -- The twilight of the Anthropocene: sustaining literature / Claire Colebrook -- Collapse, resilience, stability and sustainability in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy / Dana Phillips -- "The shadow of the future made all the difference": sustainability in Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital trilogy / Chris Pak -- The unsustainable aesthetics of sustainability: the sense of an ending in Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods / Adeline Johns-Putra -- A modest proposal for a less natural lifestyle: the paradoxes of sustainability and Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island / Hannes Bergthaller -- Jorie Graham's Sea Change: the poetics of sustainability and the politics of what we're sustaining / Matthew Griffiths -- Circles unrounded: sustainability, subject and necessity in Yann Martel's Life of Pi / Louise Squire.