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Ecocriticism

Overview of Ecocriticism

What is ecocriticism?

Ecocriticism, also referred to as environmental criticism, is a rather new, and evolving, body of criticism.

According to the editors of The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment, the "defined intellectual movement" that is ecocriticism is "largely datable to the founding of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment in 1992, originally in the United States, and then with branches in Europe, India, the Far East and the Antipodes. (4)"

I would like to invite you to read the introductions of the books and anthologies below, all of which are owned or accessed by the CSUS Library.  

Branch, Michael P. and Scott Slovic.  The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993 - 2003.  Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Print.

Buell, Lawrence.  The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univeristy, 1995. Print. 

Chone, Aurelie.  Rethinking Nature:  Challenging Disciplinary Boundaries.  London: Routledge, 2017.

Clark, Timothy, ed. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Print.

Garrard, Greg.  The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.  Print. 

Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Bloom, eds.  The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 1996. Print.

Kroeber, Karl. Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Print.

LeMenager, Stephanie, Shewry Teresa, and Ken Hiltner, eds. Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century.  New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. Print.

Lindholt, Paul J.  Explorations in Ecocriticism: advocacy, bioregionalism, and visual design.  Lanham: Lexington Boos, 2015. 

Nardizzi, Vincent.  Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019.

Opperman, Serpil, ed. New International Voices in Ecocriticism. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. Print.

Parham, John and Louise Hutchings Westling, eds. A Global History of LIterature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Print.

Slovic, Scott, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Vidya Sarveswaran.  Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development : toward a Politicized Ecocriticism. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. Print.

Takahashi, Bruno, Metag, Julia, Thaker, Jagadish, Evans-Comfort, Suzannah. The Handbook of International Trends in Environmental Communication. New York: Routledge, 2022. Print

Zapf, Hubert, Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology.  Berlin: De Gruyter,  2016. Online access.

A good synopsis of the emerging field of ecocriticism can also be found in this interview:

Balaev, Michael The Formation of a Field: Ecocriticism in America - An Interview with Cheryl Glotfelty  PMLA 127.3 (2012) 607-16.  Web. 

Much ecocritical writing focuses on how nature and the environment are represented in classic and contemporary literature.  As part of the collection of literature guides, this particular guide will direct you to sources with that focus.

 

Guide Information

This LibGuide was created by Maria Kochis.

Last Updated: Jul 17, 2023 10:21 AM