Located at the intersection of world-literary studies and the
environmental humanities, this book analyses how fiction and poetry
respond to the ecological transformations entailed by commodity
frontiers. Examining the sugar, cacao, coal, and oil frontiers in
Trinidad, Brazil, and Britain, World Literature and Ecology shows how
literary texts have registered the relationship between the re-making of
biophysical natures and struggles around class, race, and gender. It
combines a materialist theory of world-literature with the insights of
the world-ecology perspective to generate compelling new readings of
writers such as Rhys Davies, Yseult Bridges, Lewis Jones, José Lins do
Rego, Ellen Wilkinson, Jorge Amado, Gwyn Thomas, and Ralph de Boissière.
The book represents a timely intervention into a series of
field-defining debates around peripheral realisms and modernisms,
ecocriticism, and the energy humanities.