Ecocriticism

Ecocriticism studies how literary works represent relationships between humans and the natural world, including environments, nonhuman life, and ecological change.

Pastoral: A literary mode that idealizes rural life and contrasts it with urban society. Ecocritics examine its idealized countryside and the social costs those images can conceal.
Material ecocriticism: An approach that studies how matter and bodies participate in meaning-making. It shows how texts represent material forces, from toxins to weather, as active in human stories.
William Rueckert: An American literary scholar who introduced the term ecocriticism in a 1978 essay. His essay helped give the emerging study of literature and ecology its name.
Silent Spring: Rachel Carson’s 1962 book documenting the ecological dangers of indiscriminate pesticide use. Its rhetoric and images make chemical contamination a central subject for environmental literary analysis.
Environmental humanities: An interdisciplinary field studying environmental issues through history, literature, philosophy, and other humanities. Ecocriticism contributes literary methods to this broader study of human-environment relations.
Anthropocentrism: The view that humans are central or more valuable than other beings. It helps identify narratives that place human interests above ecological relations.
Ecofeminism: An intellectual movement linking the domination of women with the exploitation of nature. It examines literary connections between gendered power and the control of land, animals, or resources.
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment: An academic organization founded in 1992 to support study of literature and the environment. Its formation institutionalized ecocriticism as a scholarly community.
The Country and the City: Raymond Williams’s 1973 study of changing literary representations of rural and urban life. It provides a historical account of pastoral conventions and social change.
Anthropocene: A proposed geological epoch marked by the substantial influence of human activity on Earth systems. Its contested framing raises questions about how literature represents human responsibility at planetary scale.

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