Offers a conception of the physical environment - whether built or natural - as simultaneously found and constructed, and treats imaginative representations of it as acts of both discovery and invention.
Lawrence Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University.
Author of the widely influential The Environmental Imagination, Buell is a major figure in contemporary ecocriticism. Here, in broadening the scope of his earlier book, Buell blurs the usual distinction between natural and built environments. Exploring how a variety of texts imagine urban, rural, ocean, and desert places, he convincingly argues that literary imagination is powerfully shaped by--and shapes--a single, complex environment that is both found and constructed...Buell's book is important: it points ecocriticism in profoundly new and welcome directions. -- W. Conlogue Choice 20011101