The Environmental Imagination

1 About this book

With the environmental crisis comes a crisis of the imagination, a need to find new ways to understand nature and humanity's relation to it. This is the challenge Lawrence Buell takes up in The Environmental Imagination, the most ambitious study to date of how literature represents the natural environment.

With Thoreau's Walden as a touchstone, Buell gives us a far-reaching account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more "ecocentric" way of being.

In doing so, he provides a major new understanding of Thoreau's achievement and, at the same time, a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature. . The green tradition in American writing commands Buell's special attention, particularly environmental nonfiction from colonial times to the present.

Good for readers who want: history, nature, the environment, and a long read.

• History
• Nature
• Environmental protection
• Natural history
• Natural history, united states
• Knowledge
• United States
• National characteristics