Deserted Village and Animated Nature

Abstract

The eighteenth century has not until now been fertile ground for eco-critics, unless one includes a host of articles concerning the relationship of the early Romantic poets with nature. The attitudes of pre-Romantic eighteenth-century poets towards the natural environment has for the most part been examined through the dichotomy of town and country, through the lens of the sublime and picturesque or as part of a neoclassical tradition of pastoral verse. Taken together, this body of critical literature offers considerable insights into the ways in which eighteenth-century poets engaged with landscape in particular, but the methodology is often dated, frequently emerging from Marxist approaches rooted in the political conditions of the mid-twentieth century. Since the 1990s, by contrast, critics studying many periods of literary history have offered newly theorized readings of literature’s engagement with the environment under the banner of ‘ecocriticism’. This critical approach has been defined as ‘the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment’ or, even more broadly, as ‘the study of the relationship between the human and the non-human, throughout human cultural history’.¹ The approach encompasses a broad range of methodologies, but most ecocritics emphasize the political utility of ecocriticism in the face of ‘the most pressing contemporary issue of all, namely, the global environmental crisis’, as well as it being ‘unique amongst contemporary literary and cultural theories because of its close relationship with the science of ecology’.²