The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy

An account of the desert as a crucial but largely ignored part of our modern environmental consciousness

Aidan Tynan offers a timely and provocative rethinking of some of the core assumptions of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Showing the significance of deserts and wastelands in literature since the Romantics, he argues that the desert has served to articulate anxieties over the cultural significance of space in the Anthropocene.

From imperial travel writing to postmodernism, from the Old Testament to salvagepunk, the desert has been a terrain of desire over which the Western imagination of space and place has ranged. As our planetary ecological crisis heads in increasingly catastrophic directions, a critique of the figure of the desert in literature, philosophy and wider culture can help us map an environmental affect that finds itself both attracted to and repelled by arid, depopulated and barren landscapes of various kinds.

Aidan Tynan is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University.