The Environment and Literature of Moral Dilemmas

David Aberbach is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, McGill University, Montreal, Canada and Honorary Visiting Associate at the Environmental Change Institute, Oxford, UK. His books include, Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature, and Psychoanalysis (1989); Charisma in Politics, Religion and the Media (1996); National Poetry, Empires and War (2016), and Nationalism, War and Jewish Education (2018).

Preface by Dr. Helen Gavin A Note on the Hebrew Bible Introduction 1. The environment and the betrayal of the covenant 2. Nature and the biblical calendar: festivals and psalms 3.‘Promised lands’ and national poetry 4. Sacred landscapes in exile 5. Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh! 6. The Bible, charity and agricultural law 7. The piper at the gates of dawn: loss and Nature 8. ‘Man is the tree of the field’ 9. Free will, divine Law and science 10. Energy and its abuse 11. Environmental disaster in the Bible 12. The apocalyptic beast let loose 13. Swords to ploughshares: the vision of universal peace 14. Humility: God’s reply to Job from the whirlwind - where were you? 15. Industry and the Romantics: Blake, Wordsworth and Goethe 16. The environment and ‘Condition of England’ novelists 17. Marx: the industrial environment as crime 18. Ibsen, Chekhov, and the moral environment 19. The rediscovery of Nature in Mendele, Bialik, and Tchernichowsky 20. The Waste Land: sin and suffering 21. Environmental abuse in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath 22. Post-1945 literature: the quest for a lost Eden Bibliography