Dr Kerstin Oloff co-edits new Routledge Companion on World-Literature and the Environment

Dr Kerstin Oloff, Associate Professor in Hispanic Studies in Durham University’s School of Modern Languages and Cultures, is one of the editors of the newly published The Routledge Companion to World-Literature and the Environment.

Edited by Treasa De Loughry, Sharae Deckard, Kerstin Oloff and Claire Westall, the volume brings together international scholarship exploring the connections between literature, environmental change and the global systems that shape human and non-human life.

Literature and the environment on a global scale

The Companion offers a broad account of the relationship between literary studies and environmental concerns, tracing connections from early modern imperial activity to the contemporary climate emergency.

Its 36 chapters are organised across seven thematic areas, including commodity frontiers and extraction, fossil fuel energetics, food and land, oceans and water, disease and toxicity, environmental emergencies and disasters, and apocalypse and insurgency.

The collection brings together perspectives from across Africa, the Americas, Australasia and Oceania, East Asia, the Persian Gulf and South Asia. Its multilingual approach encompasses literary works originally written in languages including Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish, alongside texts incorporating translated Indigenous languages.

Dr Oloff’s contribution

Dr Oloff is both a co-editor of the volume and the author of Chapter 24, “Food Commodities, Anti-Extractivism and the Feminist Ecogothic in Agustina Bazterrica’s Cadáver exquisito (2017) and Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate (2015)”.

The chapter examines two contemporary Argentine novels through the combined perspectives of world-ecology, ecogothic studies and feminist theories of social reproduction. It considers how literary representations of beef and genetically modified soy expose the environmental and social consequences of Argentina’s extractive, export-oriented food economy.

Through the figure of the feminist ecogothic, Dr Oloff explores the connections between the exploitation of non-human nature, commodity production and violence against women, highlighting how contemporary literature can make visible the often interconnected forms of environmental and social harm produced by extractive economies.

A contribution to the environmental humanities

The Companion brings together eco-materialist approaches, environmental histories of capitalism and comparative methods associated with world-literature. In doing so, it offers an accessible introduction for researchers working in areas including postcolonial studies, world-literature, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, while also proposing new directions for established scholarship.

Dr Oloff’s contribution further demonstrates the importance of bringing literary, feminist and environmental perspectives together to examine the global systems behind contemporary ecological crises.

Find out more about the book and/or purchase a copy here:
Routledge – The Routledge Companion to World-Literature and the Environment