The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment

students will learn how the natural world informed innovative writing about the environment and the imagination. They will gain an appreciation of 'nature' as a contested term, analysing and evaluating uses of the pathetic fallacy and more direct engagements with the nonhuman environment. Terms such as "the edge of the public way" (Wordsworth) will be critically considered, along with some essential ecocritical theories of poetry and the imagination.

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2009

NJES, 2016

Theory and Practice in Language Studies

Ecocriticism these days is indeed a relatively new revisionist and reformist trend that has dominated the ecological point of view in recent English literature worldwide. The ecological perspective constructed under Eco-criticism delineates the nature-human alliance in both detrimental and constructive ways. The present research paper tries to inspect some post-1900 modern English literature from an Ecocritical perspective. The literature reviewed in the present study incorporates the analysis of some well-known authorship whichever is eminently written to gain insights from the ecological frame of reference. Analyzing some notable works culminates in the conclusion that the trend of Ecocriticism progresses from ‘nature- a mystic substance ‘and ‘nature’s interconnectedness to action ‘importance of maintaining nature, ‘eco-consciousness and eco-literacy about environmental issues, and finally calls to action.

Since prehistory, literature and the arts have been drawn to portrayals of physical environments and human-environment interactions. The modern environmentalist movement as it emerged first in the late nineteenth century and, in its more recent incarnation, in the 1960s, gave rise to a rich array of fictional and nonfictional writings concerned with humans’ changing relationship to the natural world. Only since the early 1990s, however, has the long-standing interest of literature studies in these matters generated the initiative most commonly known as “ecocriticism,” an eclectic and loosely coordinated movement whose contributions thus far have been most visible within its home discipline of literature but whose interests and alliances extend across various art forms and media. In such areas as the study of narrative and image, ecocriticism converges with its sister disciplines in the humanities: environmental anthropology, environmental history, and environmental philosophy. In the first two sections, we begin with a brief overview of the nature, significance, and evolution of literature-environment studies. We then summarize in more detail six specific centers of interest: (a) the imagination of place and place-attachment, (b) the enlistment and critique of models of scientific inquiry in the study of literature and the arts, (c) the examination of the significance of gender difference and environmental representation, (d ) the cross-pollination of ecocritical and postcolonial scholarship as ecocriticism has extended its horizons beyond its original focus on Anglo-American imagination, (e) ecocriticism’s evolving interest in indigenous art and thought, and ( f ) ecocriticism’s no less keen and complex attentiveness to artistic representation and the ethics of relations between humans and animals.

Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Perspectives on Ecocriticism. Eds. C. Gersdorf and S. Mayer. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006

Based on the premise that the current environmental crisis is, in fact, a cultural crisis the essay delineates why and how the field of literary studiesconceived as a part of cultural studies -can and must contribute to environmentalist efforts. It opens with observations on the conceptualising and world-shaping power of language and texts, then introduces premises and key categories of the scholarly discipline of ecofeminism, and, finally, in two brief, exemplary analyses of Margaret Atwood's novels Surfacing and Oryx and Crake, demonstrates in which way an ecofeminist literary and cultural criticism can provide environmentally relevant knowledge.

Nature, Literature and the Environment: Ecocriticism Analysis

Veda Publications, 2015

The study of literature has long been preoccupied with historical approaches. However, in recent years critics are increasingly aware of the relation between literature and geography, and drawing insights from the mutual study of these two fields. Nature and literature have always shared a close relationship as is evidenced in the works of poets and other writers down the ages in almost all cultures of the world. The world of literature throngs with works dealing with beauty and power of nature. However, the concern for ecology and the threat that the continuous misuse of our environment poses on humanity have only recently caught the attention of the writers. It is this sense of concern and its reflection in literature that have given rise to a new branch of literary theory, namely Ecocriticism. This research paper gives a brief history of the gradual growth of Ecocriticism as a post-modern literary approach. Ecocritics lay emphasis on the preservation of landscape in order to save the human race. Ecocriticism not only lays emphasis on the 'harmony' of humanity and nature but also talks about the destruction caused to nature by the changes which take place in the modern world for most of which man is directly responsible. Ecocriticism is a fairly new concept but it has gained importance rapidly. More and more scholars have become aware of it and they are eager to do their research in the field of Ecocriticism and other areas associated with it. There have also been numerous debates on whether to include human culture in the physical world. Despite the broad scope of inquiry all ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it.

The Creative Launcher

Literary theory, in general, examines the relations between writers, texts and the world. In most literary theory, "the world" is synonymous with society-the social sphere. The two most influential schools of thought that brought about great remarkable changes in people’s perspectives and life in the twentieth century—Marxism and psychoanalysis have the common assumption that what we call ‘nature’ exists primarily as a sign within the cultural discourse. Apart from it, nature has no being and meaning, they claim (Coupe 2). This vision of nature as a cultural construct permeates various schools of thoughts like formalists, new historicist, and deconstruction - all of which repudiate the existence of nature outside the cultural discourse, and take is just as a sign. However, nature affects us in several different ways, and always remains influential in human life; it cannot, therefore, be dismissed merely as a linguistic construct, and from ecological point of view it will b...