Ecocriticism Summary

Environmental Literacy and Ecocriticism Environmental literacy and ecocriticism refer to the work of educators, scholars, and writers to foster a critical understanding about environmental issues. E... Read more

In the following essay, Kroeber stresses the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to an ecologically oriented literary criticism, noting especially the need for an understanding of scientific e... Read more

In the following essay, originally published in 1967 and then reprinted in a revised 1973 edition, Nash assesses the importance of the idea of wilderness to American culture and letters, discussing ho... Read more

In the following essay, Beyers claims that John James Audubon's Ornithological Biography, which includes prose descriptions of the birds he illustrated, also offers a complex portrait of the ar... Read more

In the following essay, Sanders laments that recent American fiction does not turn outward to acknowledge nature. Why is so much recent American fiction so barren? Putting the question more honestl... Read more

In the following excerpt, Kroeber describes the beginnings of ecologically inspired poetry in the work of the English Romantics. In the first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 the first poem by Wo... Read more

In the following essay, Pite argues that British Romantic writers, far from being concerned only with solitary experiences, were social writers whose affinity for nature established links between huma... Read more

In the following excerpt, Mazel traces the history of ecocriticism, discussing twentieth‐century critics' unearthing of environmental concerns in literature and focusing especially on th... Read more

In the following excerpt, originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1908, Eckstorm assesses Henry David Thoreau's treatment of the Maine wilderness, noting his lack of adeptness as a wood... Read more

In the following excerpt, Smith examines the interpretation of the American West by Charles Webber and other writers. The Wild Western hunter and scout descended from [James Fenimore Cooper'... Read more

In the following excerpt, Marx argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson's ideas about nature are informed by American pastoralism and philosophic idealism. Three months before the episode in Sleepy H... Read more