ABSTRACT
Although the environmental movement is usually considered to have begun in the 1960s, ecocriticism only developed in the early 1990s as an emerging field in literary and cultural studies. The word ‘ecocriticism’, however, seems to have first been used in an essay by William Rueckert published in 1978 entitled ‘Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism’, and proto-ecocritical insights can be found in The Country and the City (1973), a famous survey of English literature in terms of changing attitudes towards two geographical and social spaces (the country and the city) by Raymond Williams, or in the even earlier Nature in American Literature (1923) by Norman Foerster. Nature is indeed at the core of the preoccupations of ecocritics, especially nowadays, in an era dominated by technologies and technological progress that tend to alter the natural sphere.
