This edited collection brings together twelve essays by leading and upcoming scholars, the aim of which is to contribute critically to conceptions of sustainability from the standpoint of environmental literary scholarship. The book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in ecocriticism and related fields.

Foreword by Gillen D’Arcy WoodEditor's introductionPART I: Discourses of sustainability1 The millers’ tales: sustainability, the arts and the watermill – Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Howard Thomas and Richard Marggraf Turley 2 Sustenance from the past: precedents to sustainability in nineteenth-century literature and culture – John Parham 3 Deep sustainability: ecopoetics, enjoyment and ecstatic hospitality – Kate Rigby 4 Recycling materials, recycling lives: cardboard publishers in Latin America – Lucy Bell5 Sustainability after extinction: on last animals and future bison – Joshua Schuster6 The twilight of the Anthropocene: sustaining literature – Claire ColebrookPART II: Reading sustainability7 Collapse, resilience, stability and sustainability in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy – Dana Phillips 8 ‘The shadow of the future made all the difference’: sustainability in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy – Chris Pak9 The unsustainable aesthetics of sustainability: the sense of an ending in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods – Adeline Johns-Putra10 A modest proposal for a less natural lifestyle: the paradoxes of sustainability and Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island – Hannes Bergthaller11 Jorie Graham’s Sea Change: the poetics of sustainability and the politics of what we’re sustaining – Matthew Griffiths12 Circles unrounded: sustainability, subject and necessity in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi – Louise Squire Index

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.