Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment: Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment
About the Book Series
Since the dawn of human artistic and cultural expression, the natural world and our complex and often vexed relationships with the other-than-human have been essential themes in such expression. This series seeks to offer an encompassing approach to literary explorations of environmental experiences and ideas, reaching from the earliest known literatures to the twenty-first century and accounting for vernacular approaches throughout the world. In recent decades, it has become clear that highly localized, non-Western forms of literary expression and scholarly analysis have much to contribute to ecocritical understanding—such studies, as well as examinations of European and North American literatures, are encouraged. Comparative treatments of literary works from different cultures, cultural expression in various media (including literature and connections with visual and performing arts, ecocinema, music, videogames, and material culture), and interdisciplinary scholarly methodologies would be ideal contributions to the series. What are the lessons regarding human-animal kinship that can be gleaned from indigenous songs in Africa, Amazonia, Oceania, the Americas, and other regions of the world? Which discourses of toxicity in the urban centers of contemporary East Asia and the post-industrial brownscapes of Europe and America might gain traction as we seek to balance human and ecological health and robust economies? What are some of the Third World expressions of postcolonial ecocriticism, posthumanism, material ecocriticism, gender-based ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and other avant-garde trends? How do basic concepts such as "wilderness" or "animal rights" or "pollution" find expression in diverse environmental voices and become imbricated with questions of caste, class, gender, politics, and ethnicity? The global circulation of culturally diverse texts provides resources for understanding and engaging with the environmental crisis. This series aims to provide a home for projects demonstrating both traditional and experimental approaches in environmental literary studies.
Series Editors:
Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA
Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Previous Editors:
Matthew Wynn Sivils, Iowa State University, USA
The Environmental Graphic Novel: How Green Is the Panel
1st Edition
By Pramod K. Nayar
September 11, 2026
The Environmental Graphic Novel examines the emerging genre of the environmental graphic novel, examining themes such as climate change through disaster, environmental justice, aesthetics, and melodrama. This book explores a variety of themes and forms within the genre, underscoring how the form ...
The Anthropocene Sublime in Literature: Immanence and Entanglement from Romanticism to Digitality
1st Edition
By Thomas Storey
July 31, 2026
One starting point for the Anthropocene, in which human industry has so profoundly altered the planet’s geosphere, is the invention of the steam engine in the late 18th century, a date roughly contemporaneous with the emergence of Romanticism. Through a focus on the Romantic concept of the sublime,...
The Environment in Sustainable American Studies: Powered by Nature
1st Edition
Edited
By Frank Mehring
July 31, 2026
The Environment in Sustainable American Studies offers a multifaceted exploration of the environment within American Studies, featuring contributions that scrutinize the intricate relationship between culture, power, and the environment. This book presents a cutting-edge exploration of the current ...
The Ecopoetics of War
1st Edition
Edited
By Sylvain Belluc, Isabelle Brasme, Guillaume Tanguy
May 22, 2026
The Ecopoetics of War explores the interrelationality of human and nonhuman entities in the context of conflict, as recorded in literature and culture. This collection of essays demonstrates the specific and fertile role of literature in representations of war, as it foregrounds the manifold ...
Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis: Planetary Precarity and Future Habitability
1st Edition
Edited
By Janet M. Wilson, Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, Om Prakash Dwivedi
May 21, 2026
Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis expands postcolonial precarity studies by addressing the current climate crisis and threats to the habitability of the planet from a range of ecocritical and environmental perspectives. The collection uses planetary thought-action praxis that ...
Water Stories in the Anthropocene: Anglophone Climate-Change Fiction
1st Edition
By Angelo Monaco
May 21, 2026
Water Stories in the Anthropocene explores how climate change has emerged as a major theme in our daily lives as it poses a myriad of economic, scientific, political and cultural challenges in the age of the Anthropocene. In all its forms and manifestations, climate change is primarily a water ...
Ecomaterial Ambivalence in South and Southeast Asian Literary, Philosophical, and Cultural Narratives
1st Edition
By Chitra Sankaran
April 08, 2026
This volume provides a timely contribution to the ongoing conversation on the agency of matter in environmental humanities. The first book offering an important and relevant Asian perspective to this hitherto exclusively westcentric exchange, it focuses on one of the influential theoretical fields ...
Storying the Ecocatastrophe: Contemporary Narratives about the Environmental Collapse
1st Edition
Edited
By Helena Duffy, Katarina Leppänen
October 26, 2025
How do writers and artists represent the climate catastrophe so that their works stir audiences to political action or at least raise their environmental awareness without, however, appearing didactic? Storying the Ecocatastrophe attempts to answer this question while interrogating the potential of...
Reading the Environment: Olga Tokarczuk’s Fiction
1st Edition
By Dominika Oramus
September 03, 2025
Reading the Environment: Olga Tokarczuk’s Fiction aims at analysing the dynamics of reading fiction in the context of accelerating climate change. This volume proposes an environment-oriented model of reading and applies it to a well-defined corpus—all existing English translations of Olga ...
The Ecology of American Noir
1st Edition
By Katrina Younes
April 06, 2025
This volume investigates the relationship between the conventions of noir fiction and film and its sub-types in relation to environmental crises. Dr. Younes addresses questions that not only allow readers to (re)read early hardboiled literature and neo-noir films but also help identify a new ...
A Year of Real and Literary Birds
1st Edition
By Laura Godfrey
February 27, 2025
A Year of Real and Literary Birds is simultaneously an almanac of bird life, a work of interdisciplinary literary scholarship, and a chronicle of family life. The book paints an intimate portrait of a place and a diverse cast of authors by bringing to life the birds within landscapes both literary ...
The Unconscious in Literature: The Oedipus Complex, the Death Drive, and the Unsymbolic Void
1st Edition
By Yasunori Sugimura
January 31, 2025
This book aims to investigate the unconscious in literature using Freudian and Lacanian psychology. The works of Thomas Hardy, William Golding, and Iris Murdoch are discussed from Chapter 1 through to Chapter 8. Based on the argument in these chapters, this volume considers the environmental ...