This book offers a wide-ranging international history of environmental writing from ancient Mesopotamian and Asian works to the present.

List of figures; List of contributors; Acknowledgments; Chronology; Introduction Louise Westling and John Parham; Part I. Beginnings: 1. The natural world in ancient Mesopotamian literature Stephanie Dalley; 2. Environments of early Chinese and Japanese literatures Karen Thornber; 3. The Garden of Eden in the Hebrew Bible Deborah Green; 4. Ecopoetics and the literature of ancient India Murali Sivaramakrishnan; 5. Ancient Greek literature and the environment: a case study with Pindar's Olympian 7 Chris Eckerman; 6. 'Who shall be a sustainer?': maize and human mediation in the Maya Popol Vuh Allen Christenson; 7. I invoke God, therefore I am: nature's spirituality and its ecological impact in Islamic texts Sarra Tlili; Part II. The Development of Humanism and the Industrial Age: 8. 'Viking' ecologies: Icelandic sagas, local knowledge, and environmental memory Steven Hartman, Reinhard Hennig and Astrid Ogilvie; 9. Human responses to the environment in Medieval literature Gillian Rudd; 10. Remaking eighteenth-century ecologies: arboreal mobility Elizabeth H. Cook; 11. Romantic ecology, Aboriginal culture, and the ideology of improvement in British Atlantic literature Kevin Hutchings; 12. Natural history in the Anthropocene Laura Dassow Walls; 13. Bleak House, Liquid City, Climate to Climax in Dickens Karen Chase and Michael Levenson; 14. Fantastic metabolisms: a materialist approach to modern eco-speculative fiction Tom Sykes; Part III. The Anthropocene: 15. Climate and culture in Australia and New Zealand C. A. Cranston and Charles Dawson; 16. Modern English fiction Kelly Sultzbach; 17. Ecological thought and literature in Europe and Germany Hubert Zapf; 18. From birds and trees to texts: an ecosemiotic look at Estonian nature writing Timo Maran and Kadri Tüür; 19. Contemporary British poetry and the environment Leo Mellor; 20. Rescuing nature from the nation: ecocritical (un)consciousness in modern Chinese culture Hangping Xu; 21. Eating life at a contaminated table: the narrative significance of toxic meals in contemporary Japan Yuki Masami; 22. Commodity frontiers, Caribbean natures, and the aesthetics of ecological revolution in Trinidadian literature Michael Niblett; 23. Petro-violence and the act of bearing witness in contemporary Nigerian literature Byron Caminero-Santangelo; 24. Black ants and bones: Nehruvian science and third-world environment in the fiction of Satyajit Ray Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee; 25. Brazilian women poets on gender, nature, and the body Izabel F. O. Brandão; 26. Can the environmental imagination save the world? Lawrence Buell; Further readings; Index.