The twenty-first century has seen an increased awareness of forms of environmental destruction that cannot immediately be seen, localised or, by some, even acknowledged. Phenomena such as ocean acidification, climate change or global ecological degradation may not present any obvious or perceptible target for concern or protest at any one place, or often any antagonist perceptible at the normal human scale."Ecocriticism on the Edge" explores the possibility of a new mode of critical practice, one fully engaged with the deconstructive force of the planetary environmental crisis. It forms a critical assessment of the current state of environmental criticism, offering close analyses of selected literary works and modes of reading them (including texts by Paule Marshall, Gary Snyder, Ben Okri, Henry Lawson, Lorrie Moore and Raymond Carver).The now widespread term "Anthropocene" names informally that epoch in which human impacts on the planet's basic ecological systems reach a dangerous if imponderable limit. In literary and cultural criticism, the term may name a threshold at which modes of thinking and interpretation which were once self-evidently sufficient, progressive or merely innocuous become, in this emerging and counter-intuitive context, inadequate or even latently destructive. "Ecocriticism on the Edge" considers this through the challenge of reading a text on several different spatial and temporal scales at the same time, even though these may be at odds with each other.