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A Brief History of Ecocriticism:
Where Literature and the Environment Cross Paths
The relationship between people and the environment has long been documented through literary works. In the foreword to Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition, Edward White cites Adam and Eve’s journey through the Garden of Eden (in the Bible), and Odysseus’ dangerous trek across the Mediterranean Sea in Homer’s Odyssey, as early literary examples in which human paths cross with nature.
Though formal praxis of Ecocriticism — sometimes referred to as ‘Green Studies’ — is considered a somewhat recent addition to literary theory (mid to late-20th century), we can trace a distinct rise in environmental writing and its importance in American culture through the late-18th and early-19th century. For we may look in even less “literary” works, like Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) to get a sense of the value colonial America prescribed to the natural environment surrounding them. “The Natural bridge,” writes Jefferson, “the most sublime of Nature’s works, though not comprehended under the present head, must not be pretermitted.” The key word used by Jefferson is sublime. It speaks to the way in which people (writers, artists, wanderers) saw the beauty of nature — of the landscape — as something so powerful and inspiring that it could uplift them. Then, emerging in the 1820s and 1830s — influenced by the British Romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge, who leaned on nature in their writing — American transcendentalists (like Thoreau) wrote intimately through and about nature and how it could influence society’s spiritual and intellectual growth.
Many other great naturalists, environmental thinkers and advocates, writers and essayists arrived prior to Ecocriticism becoming a formal theoretical study in literature: John Muir, John Burroughs, Alexander von Humboldt, Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, just to name a few.
Pippa Marland, and many other ecocritics, suggests Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962)[1] as marking the beginning of modern (American) environmental writing, and ultimately being the catalyst for the Ecocriticism movement.
Peter Barry, another ecocritic, provides a sense of when Ecocriticism may have officially arrived, positing that William…
