Literature and Sustainability

In today's sociopolitical world, sustainability has become a ubiquitous term. It is also an intriguing term, incorporating both an immensity of vision and the minutiae of day-to-day life. But its slipperiness is manifest; does it mean the same thing to a farmer, a conservationist, a politician or a multinational cooperation? Is sustainability a term whose meaning can be sustained?

While much is written on sustainability across various domains, it has received surprisingly less attention from literary scholarship, including from the burgeoning field of ecocriticism. One reason for this is that sustainability is often discussed in the context of broader issues such as food security or climate change. Another is the term's contested usage, for example in the disparity between its potential for safeguarding planetary diversity - a concern of many ecocritics - and its vulnerability to cooption within a neoliberal paradigm, whereby what seems mainly to be sustained is the possibility for business-as-usual.

Sustainability is a profoundly problematic term. Yet, this in itself should invite literary commentary; and indeed, such a response is more recently emerging. This collection represents the contributions of leading and upcoming scholars to the question of how literary scholarship might engage with the sustainability debate. The essays in this book explore a range of approaches, from applying tools of literary enquiry in order to interrogate sustainability's paradoxes, to investigating the ways in which literature envisages sustainability or plays out its tropes. For academic researchers and advanced students in environmental literary studies, this book offers a critical approach to sustainability.