Ecology in Literature
- LAST REVIEWED: 28 April 2016
- LAST MODIFIED: 28 April 2016
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199830060-0148
- LAST REVIEWED: 28 April 2016
- LAST MODIFIED: 28 April 2016
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199830060-0148
Introduction
Increased interest in ecological questions across many academic disciplines has given rise to ecocriticism, a thriving and contentious academic field within literary studies. This subfield, which has produced influential work from medieval studies to postmodern and contemporary literary studies, investigates relationships between human beings and the nonhuman environment. Ecocritical writings range from cultural histories of human ecological entanglements to critical analyses of the meanings of such terms as human and nature. With its origins paralleling the birth of modern environmentalist politics, ecocriticism produces historical and theoretical models that engage the rising tide of ecological awareness in the 21st century. Subdiscourses within the field explore environmental justice, gender, ethics, economic development, and the Global South, various articulations of critical theory, the relationship between the sciences and the humanities, and multiple versions of activist politics. Ecocritics collectively bring the tools and methods of the humanities to bear on urgent questions for today’s age of global ecological crisis. Often combining creative or nontraditional forms with established research methods, ecocritics invent ways to use the humanities to engage our rapidly changing environment. This discourse represents an attempt by humanities scholarship to come to terms with a rapidly changing world.
First Wave: Ecocriticism and Environmental History
The first wave of literary ecocriticism received its canonical presentation in Glotfelty and Fromm 1996, but that influential collection itself owes much to earlier speculations found in Rueckert 1996 (cited under Second Wave: Literary Ecocriticism) as well as the long history of the critical reception of pastoral literature, reconsidered in Gifford 1999 (cited under Second Wave: Literary Ecocriticism). This early wave of ecocriticism also engages with the defining moments of environmental history, as pronounced in Cronon 1995, Worster 1994, and other works.
Cronon, William. 1995. Uncommon nature: Rethinking the human place in nature. New York: Norton.
The idea of “wilderness” has to be reconceptualized, argues Cronon in his pathbreaking investigation of the history of the term in American culture. Wilderness is a societal construct that has developed out of two major cultural developments: the idea of the sublime and the American frontier myth. Far from critiquing the entities that exist in the wild, Cronon argues that the habits of thinking that emerge from the idea of wilderness need to be reconsidered to account for a less remote, more local appreciation of nonhumans.
Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. 1996. The ecocriticism reader: Landmarks in literary ecology. Athens, GA: Univ. of Georgia Press.
This collection represents the first attempt to gather together literary studies under the banner of literary ecocriticism and place ecological questions alongside questions of race, gender, class, and cultural history. Drawing inspiration from the “greening” of humanities disciplines from history to philosophy, the collection brings together criticism from many subdisciplines. Essays on nature writing, postmodern fiction, and comedy as an ecological genre suggest the multiple futures of ecological literary criticism in anglophone studies.
Harrison, Robert Pogue. 1992. Forests: The shadow of civilization. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226318059.001.0001
Harrison conducts a sweeping account of the roles forests have played in literature and culture, ranging from the texts written thousands of years ago through 21st-century artistic productions. Whether it be the appearance of the forest as the first antagonist in the Epic of Gilgamesh or the forest as the dark, chaotic antithesis to the order of the city or town in post-Enlightenment thought, Harrison points to the perpetual human tendency to carry out practices of deforestation.
Nixon, Rob. 2013. Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
Winner of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment’s prize in 2013 for the best scholarly book in ecocriticism, Nixon’s study of environmentalism in the context of global social justice has greatly influenced recent efforts to contextualize global ecostudies. With chapters on Nigerian oil fields, neoliberal environmental discourses, and the relationship among environmentalism, postcolonialism, and American studies, Nixon’s book appears poised to shape new developments in the field.
Sutter, Paul S., ed. 2013. Special issue: The world with us: The state of American environmental history. Journal of American History 100 (June).
The special issue follows a famed round table discussion in the Journal of American History in 1990 led by Donald Worster and describes how environmental history has become one of the fastest growing subfields within American history. Sutter examines the role of more appreciation of nonhuman influences by environmental historians and then describes some of the environmental history and urban environmental history subfields within American history.
Worster, Donald. 1994. Nature’s economy: A history of ecological ideas. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Originally published in 1977. Worster provides a detailed history of ecology, as both a scientific field and a cultural concept, in an effort to account for the contemporary understanding of man to carry out practices of deforestation. He traces the origins of the concept and considers thinkers through Darwin and up to 20th-century ecologists, highlighting the lack of consensus and proliferation of competing ideologies that define the field.
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Article
- Abundance/Biomass Comparison Method
- Accounting for Ecological Capital
- Adaptive Radiation
- Agroecology
- Allelopathy
- Allocation of Reproductive Resources in Plants
- Animals, Functional Morphology of
- Animals, Reproductive Allocation in
- Animals, Thermoregulation in
- Antarctic Environments and Ecology
- Anthropocentrism
- Applied Ecology
- Approaches and Issues in Historical Ecology
- Aquatic Conservation
- Aquatic Nutrient Cycling
- Archaea, Ecology of
- Assembly Models
- Autecology
- Bacterial Diversity in Freshwater
- Benthic Ecology
- Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning
- Biodiversity, Dimensionality of
- Biodiversity, Marine
- Biodiversity Patterns in Agricultural Systms
- Biofuels
- Biogeochemistry
- Biological Chaos and Complex Dynamics
- Biological Rhythms
- Biome, Alpine
- Biome, Boreal
- Biome, Desert
- Biome, Grassland
- Biome, Savanna
- Biome, Tundra
- Biomes, African
- Biomes, East Asian
- Biomes, Mountain
- Biomes, North American
- Biomes, South Asian
- Biophilia
- Braun, E. Lucy
- Bryophyte Ecology
- Buell-Small Succession Study (New Jersey)
- Butterfly Ecology
- Carson, Rachel
- Chemical Ecology
- Classification Analysis
- Coastal Dune Habitats
- Coevolution
- Communicating Ecology
- Communities and Ecosystems, Indirect Effects in
- Communities, Top-Down and Bottom-Up Regulation of
- Community Concept, The
- Community Ecology
- Community Genetics
- Community Phenology
- Competition and Coexistence in Animal Communities
- Competition in Plant Communities
- Complexity Theory
- Conservation Biology
- Conservation Genetics
- Coral Reefs
- Darwin, Charles
- Dead Wood in Forest Ecosystems
- Decomposition
- De-Glaciation, Ecology of
- Dendroecology
- Disease Ecology
- Dispersal
- Drought as a Disturbance in Forests
- Early Explorers, The
- Earth’s Climate, The
- Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics
- Ecological Dynamics in Fragmented Landscapes
- Ecological Education
- Ecological Engineering
- Ecological Forecasting
- Ecological Informatics
- Ecological Relevance of Speciation
- Ecology, Introductory Sources in
- Ecology, Microbial (Community)
- Ecology of Emerging Zoonotic Viruses
- Ecology of the Atlantic Forest
- Ecology, Stochastic Processes in
- Ecosystem Ecology
- Ecosystem Engineers
- Ecosystem Multifunctionality
- Ecosystem Services
- Ecosystem Services, Conservation of
- Ecotourism
- Elton, Charles
- Endophytes, Fungal
- Energy Flow
- Environmental Anthropology
- Environmental Justice
- Environments, Extreme
- Ethics, Ecological
- European Natural History Tradition
- Evolutionarily Stable Strategies
- Facilitation and the Organization of Communities
- Fern and Lycophyte Ecology
- Fire Ecology
- Fishes, Climate Change Effects on
- Flood Ecology
- Food Webs
- Foraging Behavior, Implications of
- Foraging, Optimal
- Forests, Temperate Coniferous
- Forests, Temperate Deciduous
- Freshwater Invertebrate Ecology
- Genetic Considerations in Plant Ecological Restoration
- Genomics, Ecological
- Geoecology
- Geographic Range
- Gleason, Henry
- Grazer Ecology
- Greig-Smith, Peter
- Gymnosperm Ecology
- Habitat Selection
- Harper, John L.
- Harvesting Alternative Water Resources (US West)
- Heavy Metal Tolerance
- Heterogeneity
- Himalaya, Ecology of the
- Host-Parasitoid Interactions
- Human Ecology
- Human Ecology of the Andes
- Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence
- Hutchinson, G. Evelyn
- Indigenous Ecologies
- Industrial Ecology
- Insect Ecology, Terrestrial
- Invasive Species
- Island Biogeography Theory
- Island Biology
- Keystone Species
- Kin Selection
- Landscape Dynamics
- Landscape Ecology
- Laws, Ecological
- Legume-Rhizobium Symbiosis, The
- Leopold, Aldo
- Lichen Ecology
- Life History
- Limnology
- Literature, Ecology and
- MacArthur, Robert H.
- Mangrove Zone Ecology
- Marine Fisheries Management
- Marine Subsidies
- Mass Effects
- Mathematical Ecology
- Mating Systems
- Maximum Sustainable Yield
- Metabolic Scaling Theory
- Metacommunity Dynamics
- Metapopulations and Spatial Population Processes
- Microclimate Ecology
- Mimicry
- Movement Ecology, Modeling and Data Analysis in
- Multiple Stable States and Catastrophic Shifts in Ecosyste...
- Mutualisms and Symbioses
- Mycorrhizal Ecology
- Natural History Tradition, The
- Networks, Ecological
- Niche Versus Neutral Models of Community Organization
- Niches
- Nutrient Foraging in Plants
- Ocean Sprawl
- Oceanography, Microbial
- Odum, Eugene and Howard
- Old Fields
- Ordination Analysis
- Organic Agriculture, Ecology of
- Paleoecology
- Paleolimnology
- Parental Care, Evolution of
- Pastures and Pastoralism
- Patch Dynamics
- Patrick, Ruth
- Peatlands
- Phenotypic Plasticity
- Phenotypic Selection
- Philosophy, Ecological
- Phylogenetics and Comparative Methods
- Physics, Ecology and
- Physiological Ecology of Nutrient Acquisition in Animals
- Physiological Ecology of Photosynthesis
- Physiological Ecology of Water Balance in Terrestrial Anim...
- Physiological Ecology of Water Balance in Terrestrial Plan...
- Plant Blindness
- Plant Disease Epidemiology
- Plant Ecological Responses to Extreme Climatic Events
- Plant-Insect Interactions
- Polar Regions
- Pollination Ecology
- Population Dynamics, Density-Dependence and Single-Species
- Population Dynamics, Methods in
- Population Ecology, Animal
- Population Ecology, Plant
- Population Fluctuations and Cycles
- Population Genetics
- Population Viability Analysis
- Populations and Communities, Dynamics of Age- and Stage-St...
- Predation and Community Organization
- Predation, Sublethal
- Predator-Prey Interactions
- Radioecology
- Reductionism Versus Holism
- Religion and Ecology
- Remote Sensing
- Restoration Ecology
- Rewilding
- Ricketts, Edward Flanders Robb
- Sclerochronology
- Secondary Production
- Seed Ecology
- Senescence
- Serpentine Soils
- Shelford, Victor
- Simulation Modeling
- Socioecology
- Soil Biogeochemistry
- Soil Ecology
- Spatial Pattern Analysis
- Spatial Patterns of Species Biodiversity in Terrestrial En...
- Spatial Scale and Biodiversity
- Species Distribution Modeling
- Species Extinctions
- Species Responses to Climate Change
- Species-Area Relationships
- Stability and Ecosystem Resilience, A Below-Ground Perspec...
- Stoichiometry, Ecological
- Stream Ecology
- Succession
- Sustainable Development
- Systematic Conservation Planning
- Systems Ecology
- Tansley, Sir Arthur
- Terrestrial Nitrogen Cycle
- Terrestrial Resource Limitation
- Territoriality
- Theory and Practice of Biological Control
- Thermal Ecology of Animals
- Tragedy of the Commons
- Transient Dynamics
- Trophic Levels
- Tropical Humid Forest Biome
- Urban Ecology
- Urban Forest Ecology
- Vegetation Classification
- Vegetation Dynamics, Remote Sensing of
- Vegetation Mapping
- Vicariance Biogeography
- Weed Ecology
- Wetland Ecology
- Whittaker, Robert H.
- Wildlife Ecology