Abstract
Few cultural categories resist critical scrutiny more easily than nature. The word itself implies a concreteness beyond the reach of historical or human influence. “Natural” conveys authenticity, a realness apart from culture or opinion. A sentence that begins, “It is natural,” uses the word as a synonym for “logically” or “of course”—as if to say that what follows is self-evident. (“It is natural that women want babies, that people of the opposite sex attract,” and so on.) Nature implies imperviousness to change, it points to physical laws of the universe beyond human control. Few people think of nature, in short, as a cultural category at all. The problem of “nature” becomes particularly vexed in academic circles, as we turn to the rapidly evolving field of ecocriticism. Literary ecology, or “green” cultural criticism, examines “the relationship between literature and the physical environment.”1 But if one sees nature as a cultural category, the problems are immediately apparent in such a practice: how do we deal with literature, or works of the imagination, as part of the “physical” or nonhuman realm? In the introduction to a landmark collection of essays, The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty draws from the example of women’s studies, laying out three developmental stages. Ecocritics must first address images of nature, mapping the various stereotypes and changes in which the physical environment has been portrayed. The second step would be to recover a tradition (one Glotfetly immediately indicates begins around 1800 and which she loads heavily toward the present). Lastly, ecocritics need to theorize, “drawing on a wide range of theories to raise fundamental questions about… symbolic constructs.”2
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Notes
Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology,ed. Cheryll Gotfelty & Harold Fromm (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996), xvii, xxiv. An observation from Raymond Williams’s Keywords,that the “idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amont of human history,” provided a conceptual foundation for the influential collection by William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York: Norton, 1996), qtd. 25. Uncommon Ground and The Ecocriticism Reader,published within one year of each other, marked two distinct camps in debates over nature as cultural construct.
ASLE’s outstanding website is maintained by Daniel J. Philippon; Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996); Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004); “Forum on Literatures of the Environment,” PMLA 114:5 (October 1999): 1089–1104 <www.asle.umn.edu/archive/intro/pmla/pmla.html>. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (eds.), Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2001); Annie Merrill Ingram, Ian Marshall, Daniel J. Philippon, and Adam W. Sweeting (eds.), Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (Athens: U of Georgia P, 2007); Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005); Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic edited an anthology of essays from Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment,providing a useful introduction to the field: see The ISLE Reader: 1993–2003 (Athens: U of Georgia P, 2003).
In September 2005, Kevin De Ornellas and Gabriel Egan organized a panel called “Shakespeare and Ecology” at the meeting of the British Shakespeare Association in Newcastle; the 2006 Shakespeare Association of America included a seminar on “Nature and Environment in Early Modern English Drama,” organized by Bruce Boehrer (April 13–15 in Philadelphia) and the 2006 World Shakespeare Congress, University of Queensland, Australia, July 17–21, included a panel on “Ecocriticism and the World of Shakespeare.” Robert N. Watson’s Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2006) and Gabriel Egan’s Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2006) similarly suggest that the approach is gaining traction. Recent works of “green” early American studies include Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006); Thomas Hallock, From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2003); Timothy Sweet, American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001); Michael P. Branch, Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing before Walden (Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 2004).
Recent works of note in early modern animal studies include: Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002; Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2006); Karen Raber and Treva J. Tucker, The Culture of the Horse: Discipline, Status and Identity in the Early Modern World (New York: Palgrave, 2005); and Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
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© 2008 Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber
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Raber, K., Hallock, T. (2008). Introduction. In: Hallock, T., Kamps, I., Raber, K.L. (eds) Early Modern Ecostudies. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617940_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617940_1
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