From Library Journal
Buell (American literature, Harvard) is godfather to the academic field of ecocriticism, which argues that acts of the imagination are crucial tools in the battle over America's remaining, revived, or paved-over green spaces. Expanding on his Environmental Imagination (Harvard Univ., 1995), his new book examines how a vast array of U.S. texts including works by Melville, Faulkner, and Gwendolyn Brooks as well as contemporary best sellers written from the perspectives of endangered species reveal a sense of place in disparate ways. In occasionally dense prose, Buell dredges up the environmental unconscious in literature and uncovers hidden metaphoric assumptions underlying the often log-jammed debate between people who hunger for fuel and condos and those who seek to save the proverbial spotted owl. Buell, a historicist rather than formalist critic, raises rather than resolves some urgent concerns underlying environmental activism (for instance, whether animals have rights that are independent of how humans perceive animals). But his revisionist literary history successfully shifts our focus to the imagination's role in today's acute environmental battles, and he shows that green is an important color in the multihued American canon. Recommended for academic and research libraries only. Ulrich Baer, New York Univ. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The environmental imagination does not stop short at the edge of the woods. Nor should our understanding of it, as Lawrence Buell makes powerfully clear in his new book, which aims to reshape the field of literature and environmental studies. Emphasizing the influence of the physical environment on individual and collective perception, his book thus provides the theoretical underpinnings for an ecocriticism now reaching full power, and does so in remarkably clear and concrete ways.

Writing for an Endangered World offers a conception of the physical environment -- whether built or natural -- as simultaneously found and constructed, and treats imaginative representations of it as acts of both discovery and invention. A number of the chapters develop this idea through parallel studies of figures identified with either "natural" or urban settings: John Muir and Jane Addams; Aldo Leopold and William Faulkner; Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Dreiser; Wendell Berry and Gwendolyn Brooks, Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, but ranging freely across national borders, Buell reimagines city and country as a single complex landscape.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal