The Green Studies Reader

by Jonathan Bate (Foreword), Laurence Coupe (Editor)

Green Studies is a booming area for study and The Green Studies Reader is a fantastically comprehensive selection of critical texts which address the connection between ecology, culture, and literature. It offers a complete guide to the growing area of 'ecocriticism' and a wealth of material on green issues from the romantic period to the present.
Included are extracts from today's leading ecocritics and figures from the past who pioneered a green approach to literature and culture. This Reader sets the agenda for Green Studies and encourages a reassessment of development of criticism and offers readers a radical view of its future.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

334 pages, Hardcover

First published October 12, 2000

About the author

Jonathan Bate CBE FBA FRSL is an English academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar of Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is also Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Provost of Worcester College, Oxford. A Man Booker Prize judge in 2014.

He studied at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. He has been King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University, Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick. He is married to author and biographer Paula Byrne. He has also written one novel, The Cure for Love.

Reviews

[Candy Wood]

Unlike other collections of ecocriticism, this one includes selections by poets and other writers before the 20th century, all previously published. The focus is more British than American, but some German and French voices are also heard (in translation). Some writers are represented more than once: both Jonathan Bate and Lawrence Buell appear in more than one section. The organization in six parts moves from pieces representing and about Romantic ecology, through theory, to more practical criticism of literary trends and specific works, and Laurence Coupe provides an introduction to each section. The writers discussed include Shakespeare, Wordsworth (both William and Dorothy), Keats, Thoreau, Hardy, Edward Thomas, Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among others--a wide variety. Because there are 50 selections in all, no one writer or topic gets more than a few pages, so that the book is best suited to its intended purpose as an introduction and encouragement for thinking and debate.

[Sainaz Farzana Kazi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicely covers many different aspects of Ecocritism, covering from literature to philosophy, from the past to the present.
Read for research purposes.

[Ricardo Silva · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're studying literary ecocriticism I highly recommend this book. Well fundamented and written, it offers invaluable insight in matters such as "Green Romanticism" and a close ecocritical approach on writers such as Blake, Wordsworth, Jack London and Thoreau.