Until the 1990s, literary scholars, when they paid any attention to science, tended to be attracted by chaos theory and notions of uncertainty drawn from physics. In the last decade and a half, however, several new works have sought to connect literary criticism with the life sciences, particularly biology.

Glen Love's book will now be prominent among them. Acting as a translator between the infamous "two cultures" of science and the humanities, he summarizes important new developments in evolutionary biology, particularly the work of biologist Edward.

Love's benchmark is "ecological relevance" and his reflections are sparked by a deep concern for the function of literature in an increasingly "stricken biosphere" rife with degradation, loss, and extinction. He criticizes the deepening alienation from nature and the life sciences he sees in much of literary criticism.

Ecological thinking about literature, or "ecocriticism," he contends, should take the nonhuman world as seriously as previous criticism has taken the human realm of society and culture. He notes that we have no phrase to describe a humanistic inquiry that includes the nonhuman (though the poet Gary Snyder has playfully suggested the term "pan-humanism").

Love focuses primarily on nineteenth and twentieth-century American authors from Herman Melville to Don. He discusses ecological thinking in William Dean Howells's realistic and utopian fictions; he explores how Willa style embodies conceptions of nature; he examines the "vexation of the heart" central to Ernest Hemingway's work, particularly The Old Man and the Sea; and he hypothesizes about the possible evolutionary path of literary pastoral, suggesting that wild nature (now seen not as simple and permanent but as complex and changing) has replaced the traditional middle state of the garden as the locus of stability and instruction.

Fortunately, Love does not see his job as that of "eco-policeman," enforcing environmental rectitude. Instead, he challenges humanists to broaden their understanding of how nature has shaped human consciousness.

He also persuasively demonstrates the rewards of a biologically informed reading of American literature.