This volume traces the development of the themes of nature and environmental thought in Brazilian letters by creating an anthology of Brazilian writings about nature, thereby establishing a history of Brazil’s environmental imagination. The volume also introduces Brazil’s rich tradition of writing about the environment to a broader English-speaking audience through translation.  

Even as the influence of the environmental humanities and ecocritical theory can be widely seen in Anglophone literary studies, it remains a somewhat under-theorized field of inquiry in Brazil. Literary and cultural studies that examined environmental phenomena were rare to non-existent in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but today that is changing. The focus of this anthology, however, lies less on how the environmental humanities as a field of theoretical and critical discourse might influence our understanding of Brazilian literature as much as it is interested in fostering a broader understanding of the ways that Brazilian letters have represented, responded to, and theorized the environment and non-human world. This anthology thus constitutes a critical intervention into the broader field of the environmental humanities by conceptualizing how the environment appears in Brazil’s intellectual and cultural archive and making a selection of that archive available to new readers.