Book review of "The Littoral Zone: Australian contexts and their writers" by C.A. Craston and Robert Zeller, Rodopi, New York, USA.

Abstract

[Extract] While wanting if I can to avoid the reviewer’s error of over-enthusiasm, I would like to say at once how much pleasure this book gave me. After years of trekking through the deconstructive wastelands, it was a relief to rest in such green pastures, where a tree is seen as a tree, and not just a text. In fact, the essays collected here freshly combine two life-enhancing activities that the literary academy since the eighties has underplayed to its cost—those of reading nature in depth and literature in abundance. Furthermore, in the present environmental crisis, ecocriticism, exemplifi ed here, is the most politically constructive work that literary scholars can aspire to.