Desert Hawk Books

 

Reminding city dwellers of their place in ecosystems

The Nature of Cities
Ecocriticism and Urban Environments

Edited by
Michael Bennett
and
David Teague

 

 

312 pages
15 photos
6" x 9"

Paperback
Quantity: $19.95 & S/H

Cloth Cover
Quantity: $40.00 & S/H

 

The editors—both raised in small towns but now living in major urban areas—are especially concerned with the sociopolitical construction of all environments, both natural and manmade. Following an opening interview with Andrew Ross exploring the general parameters of urban ecocriticism, they present essays that explore urban nature writing, city parks, urban "wilderness," ecofeminism and the city, and urban space. The volume includes contributions on topics as wide-ranging as the urban poetry of English writers from Donne to Gay, the manufactured wildness of a gambling casino, and the marketing of cosmetics to urban women by idealizing Third World "naturalness."

These essays seek to reconceive nature and its cultural representations in ways that contribute to understanding the contemporary cityscape. They explore the theoretical issues that arise when one attempts to adopt and adapt an environmental perspective for analyzing urban life.

The Nature of Cities offers the ecological component often missing from cultural analyses of the city and the urban perspective often lacking in environmental approaches to contemporary culture. By bridging the historical gap between environmentalism, cultural studies, and urban experience, the book makes a statement of lasting importance to the development of the ecocritical movement.

"The collection adds significantly to our theoretical and critical understanding of urban spaces . . . adding historical, cultural, and sociological insights to thinking about what we mean by the `natural' world." —Katherine Joslin, Western Michigan University

Michael Bennett is Assistant Professor of English at Long Island University and coeditor of Recovering the Body: Self-Representations by African-American Women.
David Teague is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware Parallel Program and author of The Southwest in American Literature and Art: The Rise of a Desert Aesthetic, also published by the University of Arizona Press.