Research Guides
Literary Research: Ecocriticism
Literary Theory and Criticism
What is Ecocritism?
"Simply put, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment... ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies... Despite the broad scope of inquiry and disparate levels of sophistication, all ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it. Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnection between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts of language and literature. As a critical stance, it has one foot in literature and the other on land; as a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the nonhuman."
Brief Overviews:
- Ecocriticism (Literary Theory Handbook)
- Ecocriticism (Oxford Research Encyclopedias)
- Ecocriticism (Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory)
- Ecocriticism: The Expanding Universe (A Companion to Literary Theory)
- Green Theory (Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory)
Notable Scholars:
- Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995.
- Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Blackwell Pub., 2005.
- Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.
- Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. Routledge, 2013.
- Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Picador, 2000.
- Meeker, Joseph W. The Comedy of Survival; Studies in Literary Ecology. Scribner, 1974.
Introductions & Anthologies
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the EnvironmentThe Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment is an authoritative guide to the exciting new interdisciplinary field of environmental literary criticism. The collection traces the development of ecocriticism from its origins in European pastoral literature and offers fifteen rigorous but accessible essays on the present state of environmental literary scholarship.
Ecocriticism: The Essential ReaderEcocriticism: The Essential Reader charts the growth of this important field. The first-wave ecocriticism section focuses on key readings from the 1960s to the 1990s. The second-wave ecocriticism section goes on to consider a range of exciting contemporary trends, including environmental justice, aesthetics and philosophy, and globalization.
Literature and the Environment: Critical and Primary SourcesBringing together 100 essential critical articles across 4 volumes, Literature and the Environment: Critical and Primary Sources is a comprehensive collection of the most important academic writings on ecocriticism and literature's engagement with environmental crisis.
The Oxford Handbook of EcocriticismThe Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism provides a broad survey of the longstanding relationship between literature and the environment... From its origins in the study of American Nature Writing and British Romanticism, ecocriticism has developed along numerous theoretical, historical, cultural and geographical axes, the most contemporary and exciting of which will be represented in the Handbook.
Also see other recent eBooks discussing or using ecocriticism and scholar-recommended sources on ecocriticism via Oxford Bibliographies.
Definition from: Cheryll Glotfelty, "Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of EnvironmentalCrisis," in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. University of Georgia Press, 1995.