"Emphasizing the influence of the physical environment on individual and collective perception, Buell's book provides the theoretical underpinnings for an eco-criticism now reaching full power. Writing for an Endangered World offers a conception of the physical environment - whether built or natural - as simultaneously found and constructed, and treats imaginative representations of it as acts of both discovery and invention.

A number of the chapters develop this idea through parallel studies of figures identified with either "natural" or urban settings: John Muir and Jane Addams; Aldo Leopold and William Faulkner; Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Dreiser; Wendell Berry and Gwendolyn Brooks. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, but ranging freely across national borders, Buell reimagines city and country as a single complex landscape."--BOOK JACKET.