Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication

Although formally named in 1978 and officially recognized as a burgeoning discipline in the early 1990s, the field of ecocriticism (environmental approaches to textual analysis and cultural studies) has actually existed for a very long time, perhaps dating back to the earliest commentaries on natural themes in ancient sacred texts. The environmental approach to literature--and soon thereafter to other artistic media and popular culture--began to receive widespread public attention in the mid-1990s. For many years, ecocriticism and environmental communication studies have co-existed as parallel disciplines, occasionally crossing paths but typically operating in separate academic spheres. The fields of ecocriticism and environmental communication studies are now rapidly converging, and this handbook aims to reinforce the common concerns and methodologies of the sibling disciplines. This handbook charts the history of the relationship between ecocriticism and environmental communication studies, while also highlighting key new paradigms in information studies, diverse examples of practical applications of environmental communication and textual analysis, and the patterns and challenges of environmental communication in non-Western societies. Contributors to this book will include literary scholars and film scholars, communication studies specialists, environmental historians, religious studies scholars, practicing journalists, art critics, linguists, ethnographers, economists, and others, but all will focus their discussions on key issues in textual representations of human-nature relationships and on the challenges and possibilities of environmental communication. The handbook is designed to map existing trends in both ecocriticism and environmental communication and to predict future directions (or, rather, an increasingly unifieddirection as the fields increasingly overlap). This book will be an essential reference for teachers, students, and practitioners of environmental literature, film, journalism, communication, and rhetoric and well as the broader meta-discipline known as the environmental humanities.