The Routledge Companion to World-Literature and the Environment
1st Edition
Will be published approx. on 30. July 2026
Book
Hardback
590 pages
978-1-032-01015-1 (ISBN)
Description
The Routledge Companion to World-Literature and the Environment takes a broad, global overview of the history, present and potential futures of environmental and literary studies, demonstrating that world-literature is itself a world-ecological force.
Over 36 chapters, the collection moves from early modern imperial activity through to the contemporary climate emergency. This book is organised into seven thematic sections: Commodity Frontiers and Extraction; Fossil Fuel Energetics; Food and Land; Oceans, Fresh Water and Hydropolitics; Disease, Toxicity and Social Reproduction; Emergencies, Wars and Disasters; and Apocalypse and Insurgency. With coverage stretching across Europe, the Americas, Australasia, the Indian subcontinent and East Asia, the Companion takes a multilingual approach, appearing in English yet also tackling texts originally written in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish, as well as texts containing translated elements of Indigenous languages. Chapters examine multiple genres, modes and media, including novels, short stories, poetry, drama, graphic narratives, nonfiction prose and oral literature.
Weaving together eco-materialist approaches to the aesthetic registration of humanity-in-nature, the environmental history of capitalism and world-literary methods of comparativism, this Companion acts as a large-scale guide for new readers and researchers interested in postcolonial studies, global or world-literature, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. At the same time, it provides an interventionist account of innovative methodological priorities and areas of topical focus for advanced scholars.
Over 36 chapters, the collection moves from early modern imperial activity through to the contemporary climate emergency. This book is organised into seven thematic sections: Commodity Frontiers and Extraction; Fossil Fuel Energetics; Food and Land; Oceans, Fresh Water and Hydropolitics; Disease, Toxicity and Social Reproduction; Emergencies, Wars and Disasters; and Apocalypse and Insurgency. With coverage stretching across Europe, the Americas, Australasia, the Indian subcontinent and East Asia, the Companion takes a multilingual approach, appearing in English yet also tackling texts originally written in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish, as well as texts containing translated elements of Indigenous languages. Chapters examine multiple genres, modes and media, including novels, short stories, poetry, drama, graphic narratives, nonfiction prose and oral literature.
Weaving together eco-materialist approaches to the aesthetic registration of humanity-in-nature, the environmental history of capitalism and world-literary methods of comparativism, this Companion acts as a large-scale guide for new readers and researchers interested in postcolonial studies, global or world-literature, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. At the same time, it provides an interventionist account of innovative methodological priorities and areas of topical focus for advanced scholars.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Postgraduate, Undergraduate Advanced, and Undergraduate Core
Illustrations
1 s/w Zeichnung, 18 s/w Photographien bzw. Rasterbilder, 19 s/w Abbildungen
1 Line drawings, black and white; 13 Halftones, black and white; 14 Illustrations, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 246 mm
Width: 174 mm
Weight
453 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-032-01015-1 (9781032010151)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Treasa De Loughry | Sharae Deckard | Kerstin Oloff
The Routledge Companion to World-Literature and the Environment
E-Book
approx. 07/2026
1st Edition
Routledge
€324.99
Not yet available
Treasa De Loughry | Sharae Deckard | Kerstin Oloff
The Routledge Companion to World-Literature and the Environment
E-Book
approx. 07/2026
1st Edition
Routledge
€324.99
Not yet available
Persons
Treasa De Loughry is Assistant Professor in the School of English, Drama, and Film at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of The Global Novel and Capitalism-in-Crisis: Contemporary Literary Narratives (2020) and the co-editor of the special issue of CLC: Comparative Literature and Culture on "Periodizing the Present: The 2020s, The Longue Duree, and Contemporary Culture" (with Brittany Murray, 2021).
Sharae Deckard is Associate Professor in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of Paradise Discourse, Imperialism and Globalization: Exploiting Eden (2010), co-author of Tracking Capital: World-Systems, World-Ecology, and World-Culture (with Michael Niblett and Stephen Shapiro; 2024), and editor of the Green Letters special issue "Global and Postcolonial Ecologies" (2012).
Kerstin Oloff is Associate Professor of Hispanic Literature in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University, UK. She is the author of Ecology of the Zombie: World-Culture and the Monstrous (2023) and the co-editor of Perspectives on the Other America: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture (with Michael Niblett; 2009) and Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology and the Global Food System (with Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett; 2021).
Claire Westall is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK. She is the author of The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature (2021), co-author of The Public on the Public: The British Public as Trust, Reflexivity and Political Foreclosure (with Michael Gardiner; 2014) and the co-editor of Prison Writing and the Literary World: Imprisonment, Institutionality and Questions of Literary Practice (with Michelle Kelly; 2021).
Sharae Deckard is Associate Professor in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of Paradise Discourse, Imperialism and Globalization: Exploiting Eden (2010), co-author of Tracking Capital: World-Systems, World-Ecology, and World-Culture (with Michael Niblett and Stephen Shapiro; 2024), and editor of the Green Letters special issue "Global and Postcolonial Ecologies" (2012).
Kerstin Oloff is Associate Professor of Hispanic Literature in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University, UK. She is the author of Ecology of the Zombie: World-Culture and the Monstrous (2023) and the co-editor of Perspectives on the Other America: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture (with Michael Niblett; 2009) and Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology and the Global Food System (with Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett; 2021).
Claire Westall is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK. She is the author of The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature (2021), co-author of The Public on the Public: The British Public as Trust, Reflexivity and Political Foreclosure (with Michael Gardiner; 2014) and the co-editor of Prison Writing and the Literary World: Imprisonment, Institutionality and Questions of Literary Practice (with Michelle Kelly; 2021).
Content
Introduction: World-Literature as World-Ecological Force
Treasa De Loughry, Sharae Deckard, Kerstin Oloff and Claire Westall
PART I: Commodity Frontiers and Extraction
1 Romance, Race, and Extraction from the Page to the Stage
Natalie Suzelis
2 Global Anglophone to Global Indigenous: Revisiting Extractive Frontiers as Indigenous Homelands
Alok Amatya
3 Gender, Energy and the Aeolian: Windfarm Developments and Saharawi Imaginaries in Occupied Western Sahara
Joanna Allan
4 "To Silently Suffer Exhaustion": World-Literature, Extractive Imperialism and the Apple iPhone's Commodity Chain
Michael Niblett
5 Waste Frontiers and Revolutionary Entropy in Chen Qiufan's Waste Tide (2013) and Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift (2019)
Treasa De Loughry
PART II: Fossil Fuel Energetics
6 Compliant Invisibility and Disruptive Visibility: Dimensions of Coal Energy in Kipling's "The Secret of the Machines" (1911) and "The Giridih Coalfields" (1934)
Swaralipi Nandi
7 (Un)Economic Exhaustion in David Peace's GB84 (2004): Systemic Reading, Body Burden and the Formal Rendering of Coal Life
Claire Westall
8 "Petroleum [the] Symbol of Venezuela's Soul": Reading the Coloniality of Oil in Gabriel Bracho Montiel's Guachimanes (1954) and Miguel Otero Silva's Oficina No 1 (1961)
Natasha Bondre
9 Theatre as the Genre of Oil: Performance, Visibility and Modernisation in the Kuwaiti Petro-State
Faisal Hamadah
10 Between Artwashing and Insurgency: Dramatising Oil Spillages in the Niger Delta
Henry Obi Ajumeze
11 "It's Not Where You Go, It's How You Get There": Petromodernity, Automobility and Short Fiction in Trinidad
Chris Campbell
PART III: Food and Land
12 Life Beyond Meat: The Expansionist Structure of Feeding in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Adventure and Romance Fiction
Fiona Schroeder and Paul Young
13 The Reconfiguration of Nature and Minzu in Chinese Eco-Literature
Haomin Gong
14 Gardens and Glasshouses: Figuring Extraction in Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) and My Garden (Book) (1999)
Stacey Balkan
15 An Indigiqueer Ecopoetics of Food: Relationalities and Rehabilitation in the Poetry of Tommy Pico
Caleb O'Connor
PART IV: Oceans, Fresh Water and Hydropolitics
16 Brazilian Modernism and the Politics of Water
Thomas Waller
17 The Hydroterrors of Indian Graphic Novels: Tracking the Hydrogothic, Hydro-mythic and Hydrocolonial
Pramod K. Nayar
18 Docupoetics and Hydraulic State Power: Infrastructural Reading, "Submerged Perspectives" and the Poetry of Muriel Rukeyser and Jonah Mixon-Webster
Alexandra Campbell
19 Oceanic Literacy: The Seascape Epistemologies of Indian Ocean Literature
Tyler Scott Ball
20 Reading Customary Law of the Sea in Robert Sullivan's Star Waka (1999) and Queen Salote Tupou III's Songs & Poems of Queen Salote (2004/2019)
Lea Lani Kinikini
21 Water and Waste in Contemporary Palestinian Literature
Hannah Boast
PART V: Disease, Toxicity and Social Reproduction
22 From Ecosickness to Ecowellness: The Environment of Infection in Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) and Ashoke Mukhopadhyay's A Ballad of Remittent Fever (2017)
Tori Bush and Pallavi Rastogi
23 Lina Meruane's Fruta Podrida (2007): Agribusiness and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Neoliberal Chile
Sebastian Figueroa
24 Food Commodities, Anti-Extractivism and the Feminist Ecogothic in Agustina Bazterrica's Cadaver exquisito (2017) and Samanta Schweblin's Distancia de rescate (2015)
Kerstin Oloff
25 Disabling World-Ecologies: Epidemic Productivity and the Climate of Extinction in Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert's The Falling Sky (2013)
Mark Anderson
26 Inhaling Environment: Contemporary Approaches to Black Poetry and Breath
Christine Okoth
PART VI: Emergencies, Wars and Disasters
27 The Anthropocene and Its Climate Wars
Malcolm Sen
28 Pyrodigms: Fire and Australian Literature
Tony Hughes-d'Aeth
29 Postcolonial Civil War, Compound Disaster and Imaginative Recovery: Cinema and Literature of the 1971 Bangladesh War of Liberation
Sourit Bhattacharya
30 United States Militarism and Environmental Disaster in the Pacific: Colonial Legacies, Indigenous Praxis
Michelle Keown
31 Slow Care in the Midst of Ecological Slow Violence: Reproductive Fiction and Philippine Post-Disaster Narratives
Alden Sajor Marte-Wood
PART VII: Apocalypse and Insurgency
32 India, Colonialism and "Energy Justice": Dinabandhu Mitra, Rudyard Kipling and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee
33 Climate Insurgency in Octavia Butler's Parable Novels (1993, 1998) and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future (2020)
Ashley Dawson
34 Apocalyptic Everyday: Climate Change in Contemporary Comics
Daniel Worden
35 Marooning Cli-Fi: Climate Emergency and the Ecology of Revolt in Caribbean Science Fiction
Sharae Deckard
36 "As one society collapses, another is reborn": Capitalism and Eco-Apocalypse in the World-Science Fiction Novel
Tom Lubek
Treasa De Loughry, Sharae Deckard, Kerstin Oloff and Claire Westall
PART I: Commodity Frontiers and Extraction
1 Romance, Race, and Extraction from the Page to the Stage
Natalie Suzelis
2 Global Anglophone to Global Indigenous: Revisiting Extractive Frontiers as Indigenous Homelands
Alok Amatya
3 Gender, Energy and the Aeolian: Windfarm Developments and Saharawi Imaginaries in Occupied Western Sahara
Joanna Allan
4 "To Silently Suffer Exhaustion": World-Literature, Extractive Imperialism and the Apple iPhone's Commodity Chain
Michael Niblett
5 Waste Frontiers and Revolutionary Entropy in Chen Qiufan's Waste Tide (2013) and Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift (2019)
Treasa De Loughry
PART II: Fossil Fuel Energetics
6 Compliant Invisibility and Disruptive Visibility: Dimensions of Coal Energy in Kipling's "The Secret of the Machines" (1911) and "The Giridih Coalfields" (1934)
Swaralipi Nandi
7 (Un)Economic Exhaustion in David Peace's GB84 (2004): Systemic Reading, Body Burden and the Formal Rendering of Coal Life
Claire Westall
8 "Petroleum [the] Symbol of Venezuela's Soul": Reading the Coloniality of Oil in Gabriel Bracho Montiel's Guachimanes (1954) and Miguel Otero Silva's Oficina No 1 (1961)
Natasha Bondre
9 Theatre as the Genre of Oil: Performance, Visibility and Modernisation in the Kuwaiti Petro-State
Faisal Hamadah
10 Between Artwashing and Insurgency: Dramatising Oil Spillages in the Niger Delta
Henry Obi Ajumeze
11 "It's Not Where You Go, It's How You Get There": Petromodernity, Automobility and Short Fiction in Trinidad
Chris Campbell
PART III: Food and Land
12 Life Beyond Meat: The Expansionist Structure of Feeding in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Adventure and Romance Fiction
Fiona Schroeder and Paul Young
13 The Reconfiguration of Nature and Minzu in Chinese Eco-Literature
Haomin Gong
14 Gardens and Glasshouses: Figuring Extraction in Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) and My Garden (Book) (1999)
Stacey Balkan
15 An Indigiqueer Ecopoetics of Food: Relationalities and Rehabilitation in the Poetry of Tommy Pico
Caleb O'Connor
PART IV: Oceans, Fresh Water and Hydropolitics
16 Brazilian Modernism and the Politics of Water
Thomas Waller
17 The Hydroterrors of Indian Graphic Novels: Tracking the Hydrogothic, Hydro-mythic and Hydrocolonial
Pramod K. Nayar
18 Docupoetics and Hydraulic State Power: Infrastructural Reading, "Submerged Perspectives" and the Poetry of Muriel Rukeyser and Jonah Mixon-Webster
Alexandra Campbell
19 Oceanic Literacy: The Seascape Epistemologies of Indian Ocean Literature
Tyler Scott Ball
20 Reading Customary Law of the Sea in Robert Sullivan's Star Waka (1999) and Queen Salote Tupou III's Songs & Poems of Queen Salote (2004/2019)
Lea Lani Kinikini
21 Water and Waste in Contemporary Palestinian Literature
Hannah Boast
PART V: Disease, Toxicity and Social Reproduction
22 From Ecosickness to Ecowellness: The Environment of Infection in Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) and Ashoke Mukhopadhyay's A Ballad of Remittent Fever (2017)
Tori Bush and Pallavi Rastogi
23 Lina Meruane's Fruta Podrida (2007): Agribusiness and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Neoliberal Chile
Sebastian Figueroa
24 Food Commodities, Anti-Extractivism and the Feminist Ecogothic in Agustina Bazterrica's Cadaver exquisito (2017) and Samanta Schweblin's Distancia de rescate (2015)
Kerstin Oloff
25 Disabling World-Ecologies: Epidemic Productivity and the Climate of Extinction in Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert's The Falling Sky (2013)
Mark Anderson
26 Inhaling Environment: Contemporary Approaches to Black Poetry and Breath
Christine Okoth
PART VI: Emergencies, Wars and Disasters
27 The Anthropocene and Its Climate Wars
Malcolm Sen
28 Pyrodigms: Fire and Australian Literature
Tony Hughes-d'Aeth
29 Postcolonial Civil War, Compound Disaster and Imaginative Recovery: Cinema and Literature of the 1971 Bangladesh War of Liberation
Sourit Bhattacharya
30 United States Militarism and Environmental Disaster in the Pacific: Colonial Legacies, Indigenous Praxis
Michelle Keown
31 Slow Care in the Midst of Ecological Slow Violence: Reproductive Fiction and Philippine Post-Disaster Narratives
Alden Sajor Marte-Wood
PART VII: Apocalypse and Insurgency
32 India, Colonialism and "Energy Justice": Dinabandhu Mitra, Rudyard Kipling and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee
33 Climate Insurgency in Octavia Butler's Parable Novels (1993, 1998) and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future (2020)
Ashley Dawson
34 Apocalyptic Everyday: Climate Change in Contemporary Comics
Daniel Worden
35 Marooning Cli-Fi: Climate Emergency and the Ecology of Revolt in Caribbean Science Fiction
Sharae Deckard
36 "As one society collapses, another is reborn": Capitalism and Eco-Apocalypse in the World-Science Fiction Novel
Tom Lubek