ABSTRACT
Although named in 1978 and officially recognized as a burgeoning discipline (or academic movement) in the mid-1990s, the field of ecocriticism (environmental approaches to textual analysis and cultural studies) has actually existed for a very long time, perhaps dating back to the earliest commentaries on natural themes in ancient sacred texts. David Mazel summarizes this development in the introduction to his 2001 collection, A Century of Early Ecocriticism , referring to the field as “the study of literature as if the environment mattered” (1). Mazel marks the onset of contemporary ecocritical studies of environmental texts and the cultural contexts of environmental communication as the publication of Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964), tracing “early ecocriticism” back 100 years to Henry Tuckerman’s America and Her Commentators: With a Critical Sketch of Travel in the United States (1864) and including Tuckerman’s essay on naturalists John and William Bartram as the earliest sample of proto-ecocriticism in his anthology. The field of ecocriticism has evolved and expanded tremendously since early studies of “nature-writing” (such as Dallas Lore Sharp’s work in the 1911 book The Face of the Fields ) and the focus on natural themes in literature (such as Norman Foerster’s 1923 monograph Nature in American Literature: Studies in the Modern View of Nature ).
