Winner, 2026 Lammy Awards: LGBTQ+ Studies, given by Lambda LiteraryWhat queer modes of resilience and care can teach us about enduring environmental collapseWhat does it mean to live at the end of life, the end of a family line, the end of a species, or the end of the future itself? When faced with unfurling catastrophes, environmentalists often limit the conversation by focusing on the future. Activists work for the welfare of fut...

We are in the midst of the greatest environmental crisis humanity has ever seen. Yet despite politicians' rhetoric, repeated warnings from the scientific community and countless international conferences, the situation is getting worse. This book brings together articles from leading socialist and environmental activists who argue that the problem is the capitalist system. Whether it is capitalism's addiction to fossil fuels and plastic or the systematic destruction of the natural world th...

This Companion offers a capacious overview of American environmental literature and criticism. Tracing environmental literatures from the gates of the Manzanar War Relocation Camp in California to the island of St. Croix, from the notebooks of eighteenth-century naturalists to the practices of contemporary activists, this book offers readers a broad, multimedia definition of 'literature', a transnational, settler colonial comprehension of America, and a more-than-green definition of 'envir...

Elegant ideas deserve elegant expression. Sword dispels the myth that you can’t get published without writing wordy, impersonal prose. For scholars frustrated with disciplinary conventions or eager to write for a larger audience, here are imaginative, practical, witty pointers that show how to make articles and books enjoyable to read—and to write.

The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good...

The Earth has reached a tipping point. Runaway climate change, the sixth great extinction of planetary life, the acidification of the oceans—all point toward an era of unprecedented turbulence in humanity’s relationship within the web of life. But just what is that relationship, and how do we make sense of this extraordinary transition?Anthropocene or Capitalocene? offers answers to these questions from a dynamic group of leading critical scholars. They challenge the theor...

In On the Inconvenience of Other People Lauren Berlant continues to explore our affective engagement with the world. Berlant focuses on the encounter with and the desire for the bother of other people and objects, showing that to be driven toward attachment is to desire to be inconvenienced. Drawing on a range of sources, including Last Tango in Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Claudia Rankine, Christopher Isherwood, Bhanu Kapil, the Occupy movement, and resistance to anti-Bla...

A controversial, timely reassessment of the environmentalist agenda by outstanding historians, scientists, and critics.In a lead essay that powerfully states the broad argument of the book, William Cronon writes that the environmentalist goal of wilderness preservation is conceptually and politically wrongheaded. Among the ironies and entanglements resulting from this goal are the sale of nature in our malls through the Nature Company, and the disputes between working people and en...

Electrifying, provocative, and controversial when first published thirty years ago, Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” is even more relevant today, when the divisions that she so eloquently challenges—of human and machine but also of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and location—are increasingly complex. The subsequent “Companion Species Manifesto,” which further questions the human–nonhuman disjunction, is no less urgently needed in our time of environmental crisis and profound ...

"Felski frees critics from relying on critique as the gatekeeper of literary studies and offers a prescient guide to life in a postcritical world." — Los Angeles Review of BooksWhy must critics unmask and demystify literary works? Why do they believe that language is always withholding some truth, that the critic's task is to reveal the unsaid or repressed? In this book, Rita Felski examines critique, the dominant form of interpretation in literary studies,...

When it was published in 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imaginationwas hailed as a pathbreaking work of criticism, changing the way future scholars would read Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. This thirtieth-anniversary collection adds both valuable reassessments and new readings and analyses inspired by Gilbert and Gubar’s approach. It includes work ...

In Animacies, Mel Y. Chen draws on recent debates about sexuality, race, and affect to examine how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, or deathly animates cultural lives. Toward that end, Chen investigates the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal. Within the field of linguistics, animacy has been described variously as a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, sentience, or liveness. Chen turns to cognitive linguis...