ABSTRACT
The term “ecocriticism,” or “the study of literature as if the earth mattered,” was first coined in 1978 by William Rueckert in an essay titled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,” but scholars had been studying environmental themes in literature long before Rueckert came along (Mazel 2001, 1). In his 2001 collection A Century of Early Ecocriticism, David Mazel traces the lineage of proto-ecocriticism in the United States from 1864 to 1964, noting such works as Norman Foerster’s Nature in American Literature: Studies in the Modern View of Nature (1923) and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964). Rueckert’s own essay, which was collected in the pivotal 1996 volume, The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, marked a dramatically new approach to literature. Previously, scholars had traced “nature themes” in literature, treating poetry, fictional narratives, and nonfiction essays, journals, and manifestos as storehouses of cultural information, artistic documents that somehow captured traditional or contemporary “views,” or “ideals” visà-vis the nonhuman world. Rueckert, however, understood even as he was first using the word “ecocriticism” that the field of literary studies might eventually contribute much more to ecological thought than merely tracing relevant themes in literary texts.
