GOING GREEN: THE EMERGENCE OF ECOCRITICISM
A selection of entries from ‘Ecocriticism’, published in ABES
The Annotated Bibliography for English Studies, or ABES, was run by Dr. Robert Clark at the University of East Anglia, UK – subsequently being taken over by Routledge. I have selected some of my contributions to ABES, written betweeen 1997 and 2000, focussing on the pioneering texts in the given discipline. I was responsible for ‘Ecocriticism’ and ‘Myth’. Here I provide my assessments of the chosen texts, but not the technical notes that accompanied the original articles.
#Kenneth Burke , Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984 [1935])
lf any work has the claim to be the first sustained example of ecocriticism, it must be this early theoretical book by the literary critic, Kenneth Burke. This third edition is particularly important, for it contains an ‘Afterword’ by the author, in which he spells out the continuing relevance of his early notions, such as ‘technological psychosis’.
Some commentators on Burke have accused this book of biological essentialism, with ‘permanence’ (being, nature) seeming to be privileged over ‘change’ (becoming, history). But the human ‘purpose’ which the book anatomises is one that proceeds dialectically from ‘orientation’ (what he calls ‘trained incapacity’, a ‘way of seeing’ which is simultaneously ‘a way of not seeing’, a too exclusive sense of ‘piety’), through ‘disorientation’ (what he calls ‘perspective by incongruity’, a sense of ‘impiety’ which allows for what the initial orientation excludes), to ‘reorientation’ (what he calls ‘simplification’, involving a ‘poetry of action’, an ‘ethical universe-building’ which is informed by a spirit of cooperation, both natural and social).
If Burke appeals to ‘the Way’, the Taoist principle that ‘there is one fundamental source of human satisfaction, forever being glimpsed and lost again, and forever being restated’, his fascination with ‘restating’ prevents him taking the mystic’s short cut to ‘permanence’. At the same time, he repudiates all causal, mechanistic thinking, insisting that organism and environment are inseparable.
His method for studying the human organism is ‘metabiology’. His premise is that, being ‘bodies that learn language’, we are capable of approaching our world in terms of motive, purpose, eloquence, belief – what he will subsequently call ‘symbolic action’. Thus, taking up the terminology of The Golden Bough, he queries Frazer’s ‘progress’ – from magic and religion to science – and demonstrates the dangers of disenchantment.
What Burke is concerned with, here as always, is the threat to both humanity and environment posed by the technological ‘Counter-Nature’ which has seemingly replaced the mythological ‘Super-Nature’.
In the course of the fascinating and self-reflective argument which runs through the book, Burke finds time to put excessively science-oriented critics like Richards in their place and to offer guarded support for the eccentric speculations of D. H. Lawrence. Those suspecting that Burke is hostile to scientific thought as such should note the epigraph, which is a quotation from the scientist A. N. Whitehead – the point of emphasis being that ‘the different modes of natural existence shade off into one another’, and so avoid neat classification.
See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/kenneth-burke-pioneer-of-ecocriticism/
See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/green-theory/
#John F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of ‘King Lear’ (London: Faber 1975 [1948])
Danby begins by proposing that Shakespeare’s tragedy of King Lear can be regarded as ‘a play dramatising the meanings of the single word “Nature”’. From this modest beginning – ‘the drama of ideas’ – he manages to build up an overall view of Shakespeare’s development as both artist and thinker (the two being inseparable roles for Danby) and of political and theological debate in the early modern period.
Lear embodies the ‘benignant’ nature of Richard Hooker; Edmund embodies the ‘malignant’ nature of Thomas Hobbes. Tudor and post-Tudor society is seen as suffering a ‘fission’ between these two, which Shakespeare diagnoses throughout his drama, from Henry VI to Macbeth. Nostalgic for the feudal idea of nature as normative (Lear) and deeply critical of the capitalist idea of nature as competitive (Edmund), Shakespeare develops in King Lear the radically Christian idea of nature as redemptive (Cordelia).
In doing so he anticipates not only the demands of the ‘Diggers’ during the seventeenth-century English revolution but also the critical preoccupations of the Romantic poets. ‘Nature’, it is demonstrated, has a history. Danby, while obviously owing something to the standard works by E. M. W. Tillyard and Basil Willey, produces an adventurous thesis which seems to have dated very little.
#Martin Heidegger, ‘Poetically Man Dwells …’ (1951), Poetry, Language, Thought, ed. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).
This essay, first given as a lecture in 1951, is perhaps the most accessible of Heidegger’s pronouncements on the relationship between what we would call literature and nature, but which he would call ‘poetry’ and ‘the earth’. Though focusing on a particular text – ‘In lovely blue’ by the German romantic poet, Holderlin – it is not a conventional piece of critical exegesis. For Heidegger, poem and commentary are complementary activities, equally receptive and equally creative.
The essay’s key term, ‘dwelling’, denotes the essential feature of human existence: learning to find a place on the earth which does not dominate, manipulate, pollute, or destroy it. Only poetry can ensure this. A secondary term, ‘building’, is applied to poetry without being figurative: poetic composition is the ground of any type of building there is (i.e., actual houses).
‘Poetry’, of course, also means ‘making’: for Heidegger, this means that particular poems cannot merely be expressions of individual emotion, for language precedes and informs all such expressions. Hence the poem ‘builds’ when it is creatively received by the reader and is allowed to open up the perspective of ‘Being’. Poetry can rescue us from the dead language of stereotype, and restore us to the richness of our etymological origins. In doing so, it allows us to ‘dwell on the earth’, fully awake to our needs and responsibilities. Thus this essay stands as a significant anticipation of ecocriticism.
#Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1976 [1964])
Having distinguished between two types of pastoralism, the ‘popular, sentimental’ type and the ‘imaginative, complex’ type, Leo Marx explains that he is primarily interested in the way the pastoral ‘design’ of the latter elaborates upon, and problematises, the pastoral ‘ideal’ of the former.
What is peculiar to the American experience is, he suggests, that the focus of concern is an actual land: this virgin territory is invested with such profound hopes that American writers are obliged to revise the whole pastoral legacy. The wilderness is on the one hand tamed and rendered productive, as ‘garden’; on the other, it is idealised, as infinite opportunity for further settlement. This revision is further complicated by the traumatic impact of the intrusion of new technology (particularly the railroads): the productive ‘garden’, emblematic of the idyllic, is now being despoiled by the ‘machine’, emblematic of the demonic, thus making it hard to maintain the initial Edenic vision.
According to Marx, the paradox is that American writers learnt how to interrogate and reaffirm the pastoral ideal from the example of an English writer. That is, the essential ‘American fable’ is to a large extent informed by the symbolism and structure of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The island in that play, like Thoreau’s woods, Melville’s sea, and Twain’s river, is an ambiguous setting in which those who have renounced corrupt, urban society have to come to terms with conflicts in their own nature (Prospero vs Caliban) as well as in their conceptions of nature (Eden vs wilderness).
The narrative pattern may begin with the renunciation of artificial life for primitive innocence; but the lesson learnt on return from the ‘symbolic middle landscape’ is the necessity of mediating between art and nature, country and city. Marx argues that the interest of the ‘American fable’ lies in the way it envisages, and engages with, this possibility.
This book is a significant work of cultural history which is an essential point of reference for those studying the development of the pastoral genre and of the representation of nature generally.
#Theodore Roszak, Where The Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (New York: Doubleday, 1972)
This book works within the framework of myth criticism while extending that discipline in the direction of ecocriticism. Taking his cue from William Blake, Roszak identifies the reductionism of Western ‘technocracy’ as ‘single vision and Newton’s sleep’. By ‘technocracy’ he means that alliance of ‘objective’ knowledge and political power that has de-sacralised nature and drastically reduced the spiritual potential of humanity. This book documents the progress of this world view, tracing its roots to the Judaeo-Christian model of the natural world as alien and hostile, through the case for its domination made by Bacon and Descartes, to the urban-industrial ‘wasteland’ we now inhabit.
In proposing an ecologically aware, post-industrial way of living, Roszak draws on an alternative tradition which has remained faithful to the imagination repressed by the literalism, empty abstraction, and oppressive rationality of modernity. He invokes the Tao, or Way, of ancient China; he invokes hermeticism and alchemy; above all he invokes Romantic mythopoeia. In all of these, he finds evidence of a natural philosophy grounded in a sacramental vision of nature, which might form the basis of a counter-cultural, anarchist future. This would involve respect for the natural world, voluntary simplicity, and mutual trust.
In short, only by rejecting the psychology of ‘the Reality Principle’, which opposes subject and object, ‘in here’ and ‘out there’, and which in each case deadens the latter, will we recover the truth of ‘the old Gnosis’, based on the motto ‘As above, so below’, which finds the sacred in the profane, the supernatural in the natural.
For literary students, the most interesting sections of this book will be those in which Roszak makes his case for the ‘visionary powers’ and ‘transcendent symbolism’ of Romanticism. It is here, indeed, that his argument becomes particularly subtle: for he painstakingly discriminates between the spontaneous vision of Wordsworth and the systematic symbolism of BIake, making clear that Blake elaborated his myth so far that it finally lost touch with the ‘vegetative’ world. Despite his early intentions to affirm nature (‘Everything that lives is holy’), the construction of his ‘fourfold vision’, in opposition to ‘single vision and Newton’s sleep’, led to an excessive supernaturalism.
Such challenging insights are representative: Roszak’s book surely stands as one of the most important pioneering works of ecocriticism, even while it reinvigorates myth criticism.
#Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth Press, 1985 [1973])
Williams’ book can be read as an expression of his ambivalent relationship with his critical mentor F. R. Leavis: a relationship that Harold Bloom would characterise as an ‘anxiety of influence’. On grounds that are tentatively Marxist, he repudiates Leavis’s assumption (encouraged by reading George Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop) of an ‘organic community’ destroyed by ‘mass civilization’; yet he shows himself equally opposed to Marx and Engels’s notorious dismissal of ‘the idiocy of rural life’. The Country and the City is an attempt to mediate between the terms of the title – along with ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, ‘past’ and ‘present’ – without subscribing to either a pastoral nostalgia or a cult of progress.
Drawing on evidence from some of the major British writers of four centuries, Williams argues against the stereotype of an idyllic rural order destroyed by industrialisation. That order was already being disrupted by agrarian capitalism long before the ‘organic community’ was meant to have existed.
However, this is not a book which dismisses any attempt to defend nature, and Williams significantly parts company with those critics who would see all celebration of rural tradition as reactionary. Perhaps the most interesting chapter is the discussion of the Romantic idealisation of nature in the face of its rationalisation, manipulation and pollution at a time of confident ‘improvement’. Williams demonstrates, by sympathetic contextualisation and close reading, the perfectly understandable ‘structure of feeling’ which characterises Wordsworth’s and Clare’s ‘green language’.
The book concludes with a sketch of Williams’ own proposal for that ‘socialist ecology’, or ‘green socialism’, which we will see him explore in various articles throughout the later 1970s and early 1980s. The Country and the City is perhaps the most original work by a critic whose originality lay so much in redefinition and revaluation.
See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/environment/
#Joseph W. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic (Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1997 [1974])
Meeker’s main thesis is that humanity has to stop thinking of itself as a wholly distinct, superior species: it has to learn to follow ‘the comic way’, which necessitates a recognition that birds and animals are just as capable of ‘play’ as are humans, and can even teach us what it involves. For they have ways of avoiding that destructive behaviour which has blighted human evolution. Comedy, then, is more than a literary genre: it is a model of adaptation, cooperation and conversation. Tragedy, which Meeker traces back to Hebrew and Greek thought, emphasises individualism, male power and the glory of catastrophe.
Meeker’s distinction allows for radically new insights into classic texts. For example, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is presented as a play which mediates between the two world views, tragedy and comedy: Hamlet is a tragic revenge hero, ultimately obliged to wreak havoc; but for most of the play he deploys comic skill in delaying his violent duty, preferring to use words rather than swords. Again, Dante’s Comedy (misleadingly labelled ‘Divine’ by his admirers) moves us from the ‘hell’ of pollution and overpopulation, through a wild and luxuriant ‘earthly paradise’, to the complex ecosystem of ‘heaven’. It depicts sin as the lack of awareness of the rights of the other – which includes, of course, the environment.
There is a comic ingenuity in Meeker’s own mode of interpretation – a willingness to improvise and to run the risk of absurdity. Thus, we might enjoy the paradox by which the picaresque genre turns out to be, for him, more ecological than the pastoral: the former teaches us how to survive and to accept the natural world; the latter offers the illusion of escape from civilisation, while reinforcing the egotistical and exploitative attitude which destroys that which it claims to love (as in the American pioneer myth, which results in the ‘machine’ taking over the ‘garden’, to use Leo Marx’s terms).
Meeker’s modestly sized book has an audacious purpose: to prepare readers for entry into the ‘ecozoic’ era of the earth’s history.
Kenneth Burke, ‘Why Satire, with a Plan for Writing One’, The Michigan Quarterly Review, 13 (1974)
This article comprises the reflections of the literary critic Kenneth Burke on his own earlier attempt to write an ecological satire on ‘technological psychosis’ and the pollution it involves.
The human mind, according to Burke, always wishes to take projects through to ‘the end of the line’. Positively, this produces utopia; negatively, this produces the world we have now, polluted and degraded as a result of unbridled technological ambition. The genre of satire is an appropriate response, as it too goes to ‘the end of the line’, exaggerating what is already the case so that the logic of our ‘culture of waste’ may be revealed.
Burke refers us to his own demonic vision, ‘Towards Helhaven’ (published in its final form in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 79,1971, pp.11-25), which presents the consequences of
‘hyper-technologism’ in a form which parodies not only the apocalypse and Dante’s Divine Comedy but also (despite the fact that he seems to be Burke’s favourite poet) the meliorism of Walt Whitman. In short, it reveals the ‘hell’ of destruction which results from our attempts at the construction of ‘heaven’.
Burke’s exposition of his own writing raises all sorts of issues about the relation between nature and culture, ecology and literature, history and form.
#John Elder, Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985)
America’s ‘poetry of nature’ may arise from a sense of alienation, a feeling of hostility towards Western civilisation, but, according to John Elder, this ‘socially eccentric impulse’ may be the seed of a new vision of integration. Thus, in the work of such poets as A. R. Ammons and Gary Snyder, he traces a ‘circuit of healing’, an ‘imaginative passage from estrangement to transformation and reintegration’.
Exploring the possibilities of the dialectic between ‘culture’ and ‘wilderness’, Elder finds further evidence in modern and contemporary American writing of a parallel dialectic between ‘imagination’ and ‘Iandscape’, which in turn overlaps with that between ‘past’ and ‘present’.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspects of Elder’s comprehensive argument, which is by no means confined to American experience and expression, are two audacious conjunctions. The first is that of Gary Snyder with Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot in relation to the theme of tradition. The second is that of the seventeenth-century Zen poet Basho with William Wordsworth in relation to the scientist A. N. Whitehead’s ‘philosophy of organism’, which replaces the dualism of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ with a ‘superject’ which is co-expansive with nature.
#Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London and New York: Routledge 1991)
To the ‘red’ reading of Wordsworth’s poetry (ie, Marxist and new historicist), which see him as using ‘nature’ as a means of escape from capitalist industrialism, Jonathan Bate opposes a ‘green’ reading, which sees him as ahead of his time, fully aware of the ‘economy of nature’ and the human responsibilities it entails. That is, to ‘Romantic ideology’ Bate opposes ‘Romantic ecology’. The latter has nothing to do with a ‘flight from the material world, from history and society’, but rather is an attempt ‘to enable mankind to live in the material world by entering into harmony with the environment’.
Within the ecological tradition founded by Wordsworth, Bate places John Ruskin, but he demonstrates thereby that we are not dealing with any bland transmission of wisdom: Ruskin developed his ‘educational programme of ecology’, based on the ‘moral of landscape’, by selecting and amending what he found in Wordsworth. Modern poets such as Edward Thomas are shown by Bate to be actively engaged with this dynamic tradition, and contemporary critics are advised to catch up with it.
This book, though not meant to be comprehensive, is both articulate and challenging, and stands as the most important British example of explicit ecocriticism.
See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/bate-leavis-an-ecocritical-connection/
See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/green-theory/
#Cary Wolfe, ‘Nature as Critical Concept: Kenneth Burke, the Frankfurt School, and “Metabiology”’, Cultural Critique 18 (Spring 1991)
As ambitious as any book, Wolfe’s article covers the ideas which the literary critic Kenneth Burke developed in the 1930s, together with his own, more explicitly ecological ‘afterwords’ to volumes from that decade republished in the 1980s. He shows not only that the early Burke was ahead of Marxism in his understanding of the dangers of technology, but also that he was formulating an idea of ‘nature’ which was later to be shared by Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer.
Burke, with his ‘dialectical biologism’, or ‘metabiologism’, offered a critique of Enlightenment anthropocentrism, exemplified more than anyone by Marx. Without using the word, Burke understood that ‘reification’ was not to be overcome by a revolution of the ‘mode of production’, but by a challenge to the very ideas of ‘man’ as dominant subject and history as the story of his victory over nature.
Defining human endeavour not by labour but by language, Burke anticipated more recent disillusionment with the Marxist notions of ‘class’ and ‘progress’, offering ‘nature as a critical concept’ in the dual sense of ‘category within culture’ and ‘criticism of culture’.
Wolfe’s advocacy of Burke, substantiated by parallels drawn with the Frankfurt philosophers, might persuade many readers that literary theory currently has more to learn from ‘dialectical biologism’ than from ‘dialectical materialism’.
See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/kenneth-burke-pioneer-of-ecocriticism/
See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/green-theory/
#Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago, lL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992)
Harrison’s complex and challenging thesis derives from the sequence of modes of ‘dwelling’ by which the philosopher Vico indicated the progress and decline of civilisation: ‘first the forests, after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies’. Wishing to avoid being literal-minded, Harrison does not match each ‘ethos’ with each of his chapters, but the general drift does run in parallel.
In pagan antiquity, the forest was known as a substantial reality, preceding human institutions, and having its own power and authority. Indeed, the very battle to carve out a culture amidst a clearing involved the acquisition of a tragic wisdom, as the human and natural realms became defined against each other. In time, the establishment and maintenance of urban rule, which involved the destruction of the forest (as in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh), revealed every founding law to be also a fatal transgression.
With medieval Christianity, the logic of tragedy was replaced by the logic of comedy: it is in this era that forests may most accurately be defined as the ‘shadow’ of civilisation. For, with polytheism having been replaced by monotheism and the sense of conflicting claims having been replaced by the conviction of universal law, the ‘dark wood’ became not only the other self, or guilty conscience, of orthodoxy, but also the fallen world. The ‘comic’ point was, of course, that that world had to be experienced and understood in the context of the Christian vision of redemption (as demonstrated by Dante).
In the post-Christian era, tragedy and comedy gave way to irony, which for Vico was the trope of detachment. On the one hand, modernity meant the Enlightenment, which saw past beliefs (such as in the sacredness of the forest) as ‘truth disguised as falsehood’, since it at least indicated an awareness that the provision of timber was crucial to civilisation. On the other hand, modernity meant Romanticism, which saw present beliefs as forming a superficial veneer over ‘natural’ instincts and affections. With the latter, we are entering the phase of civilisation in which nostalgia, while occasioned by the very detachment of the Enlightenment, represents the turning of irony upon itself.
Thus Harrison traces, through and beyond modernity, a new sense of ‘dwelling’. If the post-Christian detachment from the past has ‘culminated in one way or another with detachment from the earth’, as most dramatically highlighted by the wanton destruction of the rain forests, the post-ironic era we are entering may be one in which we realise at last ‘the ecology of finitude’. Having learnt that we dwell ‘not in nature but in relation to nature’, and that ‘the forest remains an index of our exclusion’, we may learn to revere it once more.
#Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London and New York: Routledge, 1993)
Though this is a work of philosophy rather than literary criticism, it is surely indispensable for the serious ecocritic. It explores the most fundamental question which green theory must address: the relationship between culture and nature.
Plumwood’s thesis is that nature has, since at least the time of Plato, been systematically subordinated to ‘the master subject’, the hero of ‘the master story’. This story privileges male over female just as it privileges reason over nature: indeed, it identifies rationality with masculinity, and justifies the absolute rights of both.
We will not be able to repudiate the tyrannous subject, declares Plumwood, until we have gone beyond dualism. Dualism is more than simple opposition: it constructs and contrasts categories as higher and lower, superior and inferior, ruler and ruled, according to its own dubious logic. For example, in the following list, the former is always maintained to be superior to the latter, the relationship being regarded as inevitable and irrefutable: culture and nature, reason and nature, male and female, mind and body, master and slave, rationality and animality, universal and particular, civilised and primitive, self and other.
Plumwood traces the history of Western philosophy in terms of this dualism, demonstrating how a ‘female’ nature has been systematically degraded, dominated, and exploited. The logical culmination, which now seems imminent, will be the destruction of the natural world by the ‘master subject’ in the name of ‘rational economy’ and global profit, unless ‘reason’ can be remade. This cannot simply involve privileging ‘female’ nature instead of subordinating it, for that is to follow the same logic as that of patriarchy. The answer is to develop ‘the rationality of the mutual self’, which would treasure ‘the incomparable riches of diversity in the world’s cultural and biological life’ and participate in ‘the community of life’.
Plumwood’s book is a lot richer than a short synopsis can convey. It is difficult but essential reading.
See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/green-theory/
#Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)
Like the British ecocritic Jonathan Bate, Kroeber sees his task as moving beyond the sterile antagonisms of ‘Cold War criticism’, which seeks merely to expose the politically reactionary nature of Romantic poetry in the name of a politically progressive theory. Marxism, new historicism and post-colonialism do not, according to Kroeber, elucidate’ the vision of Wordsworth or Shelley, because they mistake it for ‘transcendence’ or bogus spirituality when they should be celebrating it for ‘transformation’ or creative engagement. Criticism should attend more to the ‘holistic’ quality of Romantic poetry, and should show more respect for the integrity of the given poem and for what Keats called the ‘interassimilative’ relationship between the cultural/psychic and natural/physical orders of being.
Scientific discoveries of our age, particularly those of biology, have only vindicated the prophetic insights of the Romantics: mind and nature are not opposed but are continuous; the human capacity for self-consciousness is an evolutionary advance which itself demonstrates humanity’s biological roots.
Thus Wordsworth’s explorations of the workings of memory and the ‘growth’ of the mind anticipate the ‘neural Darwinism’ of today. Kroeber may, of course, be criticised for overemphasising continuity and cohesion in his eagerness to put ideological criticism in its place; and he may also be accused of putting too much trust in the disinterestedness of scientific enquiry. But his book is full of insights, and his defence of Romantic poetry against the arrogance of ‘Cold War criticism’ is surely welcome.
#Patrick D. Murphy, Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995)
The three untitled parts of this book deal respectively with theory, with particular authors and with pedagogy, though there is obviously considerable overlap between these categories. Murphy’s main interest is in moving forward to an anti-essentialist ecocriticism.
Identifying postmodernism positively with post-humanism (since the anthropocentric attitude is what has got us into our present global mess), he yet repudiates that irony and complicity which passes for much postmodernist thinking. There must be scope for agency, action and alternative. For these he looks to the example of Bakhtin’s ‘dialogics’: the notion of a self which lives by virtue of response to the ‘other’. From a Bakhtinian perspective, he reassesses feminism, being wary of ‘nature as woman’ since it may be seen as an oppressive construction.
Similarly, when considering ecology itself, he sharply distinguishes it from ‘managing the environment’, an enterprise which only substantiates the alienated and dominating consciousness of the Enlightenment. Murphy wants not ‘hierarchy’ but ‘heterarchy’: that is, a ‘volitional interdependence’ between humanity and ecosystem, a sense of ‘natured culture’ rather than ‘culture v nature’.
Instead of speaking of humanity as ‘one for oneself’ and nature as ‘things-for-us’, instead of seeking abstraction and ‘universal knowledge’ of a world that is rendered moribund in the process, Murphy proposes ‘culturopoeia’, an openness to the life and possibilities of the biosphere which takes the form of ‘situated knowledges’. To effect such insights, the ecocritic must behave like the Amerindian ‘trickster’. Ecocriticism must be guided by the spirit of ‘anotherness’, opening itself to the present of nature in order to find a viable future of ‘interanimation’.
The key writers invoked – mainly in Part 2, but also throughout – are Gary Snyder and Ursula Le Guin, but there is also a fascinating account of Patricia Hampl’s poetic sequence, Resorf. Again, Murphy offers an audacious critique of the category of ‘nature writing’, which he takes to be all about the realisation of the male self by way of a female nature. This is a demanding but rewarding book.
#Terry Gifford, Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995)
The pastoral tradition of poetry, which is this book’s starting point, suggests a static notion of nature and of humanity’s relation to nature, ignoring the facts of rural existence and seeking solace in a special place (Arcadia) and a special time (the Golden Age). Gifford, following Raymond Williams, queries this convention, demonstrating that ‘nature is a way of thinking’ and, as such, is inseparable from a specific culture and a specific history. While acknowledging the radical reworking of this tradition by recent poets such as R. S. Thomas, he is more interested in the ‘anti-pastoral’ line, running from Crabbe and Clare to Patrick Kavanagh, which raises radical questions about the relationship between human and natural life.
His main interest, however, is in the ‘post-pastoral’ poetry which ‘anti-pastoral’ makes possible. Sorley MacLean works within the Gaelic culture and language, pushing their possibilities of expression to the limit in the face of global disaster, thereby transcending the traditional conception of ‘nature poetry’. Seamus Heaney, taking his cue from Wordsworth’s lines in ‘Home at Grasmere’ about the ‘exquisite’ way the external world and the mind are ‘fitted’, explores three interrelated themes: ‘the human as organic and animal; the pagan elements of tribal culture; and the notion of art as finding expression for the earth itself’. Ted Hughes follows BIake in addressing the problem of human dislocation from nature. He knows, in Gifford’s words, that ‘an apparent engagement with the natural world’ may effectively exclude ‘uncomfortable forces and their tensions’, as in the pastoral convention. His work discovers these forces to be at work ‘within human nature as well as external nature’, and to be both creative and destructive, as implied by Blake’s ‘fearful symmetry’. But his ‘post-pastoral’ vision also allows scope for a ‘green poetry’ which is not afraid to address specific environmental issues. This fourth kind of poetry, explicit and engaged, while conscious of cultural and historical identity, is shown to be equally valid in the hands of such diverse figures as David Craig, Heathcote Williams, Grace Nichols and Debjani Chatterjee.
This is a highly intelligent and challenging book.
#Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)
Lawrence Buell’s focus is on the ‘environmental nonfiction’ of Thoreau, but this monumental book also offers many insights into the representation of nature in poetry and fiction. The implication is that ‘ecocriticism’, defined as ‘the study of the relation between literature and environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmental praxis’, provides a radical and valid alternative to the critical orthodoxy of the past few decades. The main challenge posed is that of negotiating the legacy of ‘anthropocentrism’, often most influential where it has seemingly been denied (for instance, in much poststructuralist thinking), and to see what might be involved once we begin again to conceive of the non-human environment as a living presence and process rather than a mere cultural referent.
However, while reaffirming the importance of mimesis, Buell should not be thought to be commending the unproblematic depiction of nature: in discussing ‘literary naturism’, that is, the representation of ‘Iiteral nature’ as part of a ‘literary project’, he argues that the European literary tradition and its conventions are there to be reinterpreted rather than repudiated.
Thus, in Part 1, ‘Historical and Theoretical Contexts’, he demonstrates that ‘pastoral ideology’ may be seen positively as well as negatively, as in the central case of Thoreau: his pastoralism served him well in his challenge to the work ethic and earnest agrarianism.
It is in Part 2, ‘Forms of Literary Ecocriticism’, that Buell celebrates what is distinctive about environmentally responsible writing. Here he explores the possibilities of the ‘aesthetics of relinqueshment’, as he discusses a variety of texts which enact the move from the ‘egological self’ to the ‘ecological self’.
Part 3, ‘Environmental Sainthood’, reconsiders Thoreau, and in particular his simultaneous ‘canonization’ as environmental hero and as ‘green’ writer. Walden is used to illustrate how the environmental imagination can encourage new notions of person, of place and of planet. Buell’s ingenious, resourceful and ambitious book is a crucial work of ecocriticism.
See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/green-theory/
#Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995).
This is one of the best starting points for anyone seriously engaged in the study of the relation between culture and nature, literature and the environment. It is a work of philosophy, strictly speaking, but it explores with considerable rigour many of the issues which arise in literary and cultural studies. Soper finds a tension in contemporary thinking between ‘nature-endorsing’ views and ‘nature-sceptical’ views. While we may want simply to identify the one with ‘deep ecology’ and the other with postmodern relativism, we are warned that things are always more complicated than they seem. Green thought may ultimately be realist, but its appeal to nature must imply an acknowledgement of the fact that ‘nature’ is always culturally mediated and, indeed, has been used to sanction reactionary politics. However, the stress on construction and contingency, as opposed to ‘intrinsic value’, itself stands in need of correction. Soper’s own position is that, while ‘there is no reference to that which is independent of discourse except in discourse’, we must yet grant nature a significant degree of independence, for otherwise ‘we can offer no convincing grounds for challenging the pronouncements of culture on what is or is not “natural”’.
But her case for realism is a sophisticated one, and it negotiates many contradictions within ecological thinking. For example, the characterisation of nature as female, frequent in ecological polemic, was also adopted by colonialism, with its Oedipal imagery (the wilderness as alternately mother and maid, awaiting male desecration): the task, then, is to reappropriate and redefine the symbolism. Moreover, she sees ecofeminism as correct to draw a parallel between that other patriarchal conception of nature as bestial ‘other’ to human culture and that of the conception of woman as ‘inferior’ to man … and to counter both.
Soper’s thesis is that, while nature has an extra-discursive reality, the signification of nature is a site of ideological struggle, in which rhetoric must take a major role. This by no means commits her to the relativism of pure constructivism; but it does mean she insists on the distinction between the human and natural orders, on the understanding that it is only thereby that the former may exercise concern for the latter. Thus ‘deep ecology’ may dismiss the notion of humanity’s distinctiveness, but the very idea of ecological responsibility presupposes ‘the possession by human beings of attributes that set them apart from all other forms of life’.
All this may seem remote from literary matters, but one of Soper’s key insights is that ‘green’ discourse is primarily ‘aesthetic’ (nature as surface appearance) even while it draws on the ‘realist’ assumptions of the natural sciences (nature as norm) and on the ‘metaphysical’ assumptions of philosophy (nature as the category through which humanity thinks its difference from non-humanity). This allows her to explore many fascinating topics: for example, the contrast between the ‘sublime’ and the ‘pastoral’ conventions; again, the way Thomas Hardy’s reflections on Egdon Heath anticipate the critical insights of Raymond Williams in The Country and the City. With other observations on the poetry of Wordsworth (particularly in relation to the colonial imagery indicated above) and the aesthetics of Adorno and Heidegger (curiously similar, despite their immense ideological differences), this book is an indispensable tool for the serious student of ecocriticism.
Soper’s book is memorable for many of her pronouncements. One of the most striking is this: ‘It isn’t language that has a hole in its ozone layer.’
#Cheryl Glotfelty & Harold Fromm (eds), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996)
Cheryll Glotfelty argues persuasively in her introduction that the fate of the planet should be at least as important to critical theory as are class, gender, and race: ecocriticism should now rank in stature with Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial criticism. The volume is divided into three parts, which offer a fair indication that an ecologically oriented criticism is a substantial discipline and not just a passing fashion: ‘Ecotheory: Reflections on Nature and Culture’; ‘Ecocritical Considerations of Fiction and Drama’; and ‘Critical Studies of Environmental Literature’.
This timely anthology has the advantage of being able to draw on some of the more established ecocritical material, dating back to the 1970s, much of which still manages to be quite provocative. There is, for example, Joseph Meeker’s defence of comedy as more alert than tragedy to the ‘mature complexity’ of the ecosystem. Or again, there is William Rueckert’s intriguing formulation of a ‘generative poetics’, in which poems would be ‘green plants’. These balance well with newer material, which has clearly benefited from the elder critics’ pioneering conjectures. For example, Scott Slovic reflects on nature as both ‘correspondence’ and ‘otherness’, both ‘intimacy’ and ‘distance’, with ‘nature writing’ offering the model of mediation. Also, Suellen Campbell explores ‘desire’ as a meeting point for poststructuralism and ‘deep ecology’.
Again, and even more strikingly (particularly as she is the most important contemporary writer whose work is informed by ecological concern, apart from Gary Snyder), Ursula Le Guin compares the male ‘weapon’ approach to nature (aggressive, negative, linear) with the female ‘carrier bag’ approach (receptive, affirmative, cyclical), finding that each of them produces a different conception of narrative.
This long-awaited and necessary volume will be welcome to all students of ecocriticism, even though it is primarily focused on the United States. A most significant innovation, it will be seen as a critical milestone in the years to come.
See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/green-theory/
#Louise H. Westling, The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction (Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996)
Louise Westling’s title comes from an elegaic phrase in The Great Gatsby, where it denotes a landscape developed almost to the point of destruction by people like Gatsby. The lost dream of the New World is seen as haunting not only the narrator of that novel, Nick Carraway, but American fiction and Western narrative generally.
With an ambitious sweep of exposition, the author demonstrates how male heroism has been defined by opposition to female nature ever since the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh. There the heroic quest involves destruction of a forest sacred to lnanna/lshtar; however, the assault on nature is made in the context of a long-standing awe for the goddess.
With the rise of Judaeo-Christianity, and later with the settlement of North America, the nomadic, pioneer spirit assumes total command over the ‘virgin’ territory it encounters, but in the later case, a residual sentimentality about a land personified as female informs and defines the aggression. Westling articulates this tension very clearly in her account of American fiction, within which category she provocatively includes what would normally be called nature writing.
Her argument is particularly fascinating when she addresses the ‘hierarchical’ attitude to nature of Emerson (evincing his debt to Platonic idealism) and the deep ambivalence of Thoreau to nature as female ‘other’. Again, she offers a persuasive account of what she calls ‘the defensive masculinism of Hemingway’s and Faulkner’s modernist primitivism’. But she encompasses female authors also, tracing the implications of Willa Cather’s attempts to celebrate female heroism in a beautiful but threatening environment and of Eudora Welty’s revaluation of ‘an embodied feminine identity with the Mississippi landscape’.
This is a rich work of scholarship and an exciting enquiry into the assumptions of American ideology. The conjunction of landscape and gender produces some radical insights.
See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/green-theory/
#Curry, Patrick, Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1997)
ln its own way as important as Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth, this study of Tolkien not only situates The Lord of the Rings in relation to the mythic tradition but also defends it from the sceptical gaze of the contemporary critical establishment. Invoking thinkers such as Max Weber, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and Zygmunt Baumann, Curry argues that, given the demise of modernity, myth comes into its own. The world is re-enchanted, and the importance of mystery is reaffirmed. In discussing Middle-Earth, we are also discussing Nature in all its wonder.
Here the genre of fantasy is defended in particular, but the author is careful on the one hand to distinguish Tolkien’s art from that of the entertainment industry, and on the other hand to refute the notion that it is less ‘radical’ than that of feminist fantasists such as Angela Carter. Indeed, a particularly interesting aspect of the book’s thesis is that Lord of the Rings turns out to be more thoroughly postmodernist than those more recent works with mythopoeic pretensions. Curry skilfully disposes of the problem of Tolkien’s ‘allegory’, and he delicately negotiates the matter of his religious position (ie, Christian, but deeply sensitive to animism and polytheism).
This polemical book, written in a highly personal and compelling style, certainly merits inclusion under the category of ‘Ecocriticism’.
#Rachel Stein, Shifting the Ground: American Women Writers’ Revisions of Nature, Gender, and Race (Charlottesville, VA, and London: University of Virginia Press, 1997)
lf the traditional pioneer language of settlement saw nature as a woman, to be subjugated, exploited, and sexually assaulted, the four writers chosen by Rachel Stein demonstrate the possibility of ‘turning over’ or ‘overturning’ that dominant discourse, by means of first disorientating then reorientating it. The metaphor in her main title comes from the act of the preparatory displacement of the soil, the ‘shifting of the ground that promotes a new planting, that enables the cultivation of a new relationship between speaker and nature, between speaker and history’. As indicated by the subtitle, ‘revisions of the intersections of nature, gender and race’ are a means to ‘shift the ground of problematic aspects of American identities and allow the writers to imagine more fertile social/natural interrelations’.
For the received definition of nature as female object or Other, outside of culture and needing to be mastered by the male subject, has only ‘naturalised’ the domination of actual women, perceived as close to, or even identical with, nature. This patriarchal and hierarchical ideology has been justified by binary opposition.
Inspired by the theories of Donna Haraway, Stein advocates a ‘cyborgian intermingling’ of those opposites, a substitution of the model of mutuality and imaginative provisionality for that of alienation and dogmatic rationality. Hence, she commends the poetry of Emily Dickinson for its transgression of male-female boundaries, and its celebration of nature’s unpredictability. She commends the fiction of both Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker for its repudiation of the subjection of women of colour as beasts of burden and for its recovery of the power of spiritual collectivity, rooted in a spiritual response to nature. She commends the fiction of Leslie Marmon Silko for its engagement in ‘story wars’, its subversion of the dominant North American ‘master plot’ by a patchwork of tales which foster continuity between the human and the natural rather than suspicion and subordination.
In her discussion of each case, Stein pays close attention to formal innovations, for part of her argument is that the convention of realism has been the ‘ground’ of the oppressive conceptualisation of nature, gender, and race.
#Edward Picot, Outcasts from Eden: Ideas of Landscape in British Poetry since 1945 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997)
This book argues that some of the most important British poetry of the period since the Second World War may be seen as subscribing to the ‘Fall myth’, which in turn presupposes the ‘Eden myth’. The Book of Genesis is the source, since it depicts nature as a paradise garden from which humanity has been excluded.
The idea that there is a carefree, divinely ordained order of existence which human beings know themselves to have lost is an example of the principle which Picot calls ‘separatism’. This involves a false opposition between ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’, between mind and body, between the psyche and physicality. Darwin’s work may have demonstrated that in each case the former is very much rooted in the latter, and poets may have wished to incorporate this understanding into their verse. But again and again, we find the language and imagery they use reinforcing the notion of nature as something quite other than the human realm, and at the same time a refuge from human cares.
Picot finds two versions of separatism at work in his chosen poets: Hughes and Thomas are ‘primitivists’, who celebrate the possibility of ‘Man’ transcending his conscious, anxious self by merging with the landscape; Larkin and Tomlinson are ‘rationalists’, who acknowledge that such a merger is impossible, but insist that humanity is diminished by failing to take its need for nature into account; Heaney shows signs of both tendencies, celebrating the healing power of the Irish landscape, but exploring the historical context within which that celebration has become possible.
Picot is not afraid to criticise his five poets (though he is perhaps kindest to Heaney), nor does he have any patience with ‘separatism’ itself. He predicts that, in keeping with contemporary science’s promotion of ‘holism’, the future of nature poetry will lie in a new sense of the interconnectedness of ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’, accompanied by a new commitment (implicit in Genesis, but for long suppressed) to the ‘stewardship’ of creation. If Picot is an ecocritic, he may find himself in disagreement with some others, but his contribution to ecocriticism is welcome.
#Richard Kerridge & Neil Sammels, eds, Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature (London: Zed Books, 1998)
The title and the introduction indicate that all the essays in this volume focus, in some way or other, not so much on the theme of nature as on the question of how it is represented. In our era of ecological disaster we need to find new narratives by which to articulate our relation to the planet. Thus, this book is as much about culture as it is about nature.
With regard to how a theory of ‘writing the environment’ might take shape: Patrick Murphy advocates an ecofeminism informed by Bakthin’s principle of ‘anotherness’, which deconstructs any rigid division between ‘I’ as culture/male/mind and ‘other’ as nature/female/body; while Dominic Head proposes a consciously ‘weak anthropocentrism’ which has benefited from postmodern provisionality and pluralism.
With regard to traditional texts, ecocriticism has much to teach us about their residual relevance: Barbara White finds the seventeenth-century ‘Jeremiad’ still influential, in so far as natural catastrophe is given a spiritual or moral explanation; and Neil Sammels commends Oscar Wilde’s aestheticisation of nature, as an alternative to the impulse to ‘annex’ it ‘in the name of morality, normativity or nation’.
With regard to contemporary writing and entertainment, the problem of representation becomes acute: Karla Ambruster queries televison documentaries’ claim to ‘speak for’ nature; Richard Kerridge takes Don DeLillo’s novel ‘White Noise’ as a challenge to the reader’s wish for closure and stability in the face of ecological crisis; Greg Garrard praises Seamus Heaney’s poetry for exploring the violence and the victimisation which can (and has) been involved in ‘dwelling’ on the earth.
This last insight may remind us how strong and yet how anxious an influence is exerted on ecocriticism by the philosopher Martin Heidegger. If Garrard expresses the anxiety, Jonathan Bate, in contributing to the ‘theory’ section, expresses the strength: in a fascinating account of ‘poetry and biodiversity’, he demonstrates how much an ‘ecological poetics’ can learn from Heidegger, and how poets as diverse as Edward Thomas, Basil Bunting and Les Murray may be seen, in Heideggerian fashion, as exploring what it means to treat nature as a ‘home’ or ‘bioregion’.
In demonstrating that ‘writing the environment’ is a matter of continuing and exciting debate, this volume performs an invaluable service.
#Jhan Hochman, Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Theory (Moscow, lD: University of Idaho Press, 1998)
To the categories already dealt with by cultural studies – that is, class, gender, ethnicity, age (as in ‘youth culture’) – Hochman adds that of ‘worldnature’. He prefers this nomenclature, because ‘Nature’ with a capital N implies a philosophical idealism and because it has too often been invoked for reactionary purposes.
His aim, stated in his succinct and lively introduction, is to prevent the appropriation of nature by culture. His mentor here is the Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno, who insisted that nature needs defending against the given culture, rather than Marx himself, who referred to nature dismissively as a ‘tool house’. Nor has he much time for poststructuralists who glibly talk of nature as a ‘construction’, thus confusing the fact that humans ‘fashion’ nature to suit themselves with the bogus notion that they somehow ’cause it to exist’ through language.
Two targets for his incisive polemic, dealt with at some length in this book, are Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway. Hochman finds much common ground between them, even though the former says little about ecology while the latter says a good deal. Both effectively render nature a mere extension of culture, even while they aim to deconstruct the boundary between the two.
Nor does Hochman rest content with challenging philosophical positions. He addresses also the fiction of D. H. Lawrence, noting a contradiction between the explicit attempt to represent nature in its distinctive otherness and an implicit, residual anthropomorphism, as if he cannot break away finally from the traditional hierarchical notion of the ‘chain of being’. Again, we are invited to consider the way the film The Silence of the Lambs (like the novel upon which it is based) effectively ‘silences’ the real screams of real, suffering animals by displacing their suffering into the mind of the protagonist.
The whole volume is a rich source of insights, and is an important contribution to cultural studies and ecocriticism alike.
#Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000)
Jonathan Bate effectively launched British ecocriticism in 1991 with his book, Romantic Ecology. There he polemically and briefly proposed a ‘green’ tradition running from Wordsworth and Clare through Ruskin and Morris to Edward Thomas and beyond.
In the present book, written nearly a decade later, Bate takes a much more leisurely look at the subject of what he now calls ‘ecopoetics’. The intellectual perspective is much wider here, taking in the philosophers Rousseau, Heidegger, Adorno and Bachelard. The poetic tradition is now more focused on Clare than on Wordsworth, and it expands to include Rilke, Stevens, Bunting, and Murray. An interesting rediscovery in the sphere of fiction is Hudson’s Green Mansions, a prophetic novel about a western individual’s attitude to a threatened rain forest.
The premise of all the particular studies and arguments gathered here is that, given that culture is defined by opposition to nature, the latter becoming the ‘other’ which haunts the former; and humanity being alienated from its ‘earth household’, the only way forward is the cultivation of an ecological awareness that might take us beyond anthropocentrism. This awareness is made possible by poetry. Thus, ‘green politics’ can never fully address the challenge of our era unless it acquires an aesthetic dimension. Bate proposes that what matters is a change of consciousness and a new way of ‘dwelling’ on the earth: in other words, ‘ecopoetics’ is about letting nature speak, about hearing ‘the song of the earth’, rather than treating it as an item on a political agenda. This is a book which will be the
focus of debate for many years to come.
#Laurence Coupe (ed.), The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (London & New York: Routledge, 2000)
Rather than write about my own book, I here cite the assessments of others below.
Jonathan Bate concludes his foreword to the volume as follows:
The Green Studies Reader should take its place as a central text in any course on the relationship between literature and questions of ecology and environment. The editor has done a superb job in terms of both extracts chosen and organisational principles. For the first time, it is possible to see both the continuity and the variety of the traditions in which ‘green thinking’ has emerged within literary culture. The theoretical, historical and practical exemplars collected in this book will stimulate new generations of students into new and vital reanimations and rethinkings of their literary inheritance.
Madeleine Minson in her review for the Times Higher Educational Supplement states:
Some 30 years after environmentalism became a force to be reckoned with in politics, it is finally making inroads into literary criticism. Urged on by the ever-growing threat to the planet – or indeed by the sheer love of nature – green theorists and critics are busy putting the physical environment centre stage, often with a view to effecting political change. Laurence Coupe’s Green Studies Reader provides an excellent overview of achievements to date in this emerging field. … [It] has the air of a pioneering publication. … With courses in ecocriticism beginning to appear in British universities, it should make a very good textbook indeed.
Peter Barry, in the final chapter of the second edition of his comprehensive and influential work, Beginning Theory (Manchester: MUP, 2002) recommends the book as follows:
This is the definitive UK collection, but it represents major contemporary American voices (Soper, Snyder, Slovic, Buell, Roszak, Glotfelty, etc) as well as British ones (Bate, Gifford, Garrard, Kerridge, etc), and includes early material from the Romantic period onwards. Fifty chapters, mostly quite short, in six well conceived and well introduced sections, so the book is kept to a sensible size of around 300 pages.
Kate Rigby, in the annotated bibliography to her lucid overview of ecological literary theory, which is included in Introducing Criticism of the 21st Century, edited by Julian Wolfrey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), writes:
[The reader] is particularly valuable in that it embeds contemporary ecocritical research and reflection in a longer history of thinking about the relationship between nature and culture from romanticism through to the critique of modernity by twentieth-century writers and philosophers, such as D. H. Lawrence, Adorno, Horkheimer and Heidegger. The second section on ‘Green Theory’ provides the basis for a more philosophically reflected ecocriticism by including work by critical theorists such as Kate Soper , Donna Haraway and Lyotard, while the final section provides a good range of examples of practical ecocriticism, including work on popular as well as canonical texts. Coupe’s general introduction and his introductions to each of the sections provide an excellent guide to the key questions motivating green theory and criticism today.