SOURCE: Kroeber, Karl. “Feminism and the Historicity of Science.” In Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind, pp. 22‐36. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

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 ecology.

In calling for an ecologically oriented criticism I appeal to intensified awareness of the historicity of all our intellectual disciplines. It would seem banal so to appeal, but that Cold War critics, even new historicists, have paid minimal attention to the evolution of our understanding of the natural world, despite their fondness for the truism that conceptions of nature are cultural constructs. An ecological criticism must be historically more self‐conscious, if only because ecology is a relative newcomer in the world of science. Such self‐consciousness, moreover, is a requisite for any kind...