A study of eco-criticism in english literature

Eco-criticism is an academic discipline which began in the 1990s although it had its roots in the late 1970s. The representations of nature in literary works, the relationship between literature and the environment, the investigation of underlying ecological values and the human perception of environment are focused in this discipline. Cheryll Glotfelty, one of the pioneers in this field, defines eco-criticism as the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. In fact, the credit goes to William Rueckert because the term ‘Eco-criticism’ was coined by him in 1978 in one of his essays “Literature and Ecology: An experiment in eco-criticism”. Moreover, he threw a light on ecology and literature and attracted the world in that essay. Ecologists and scholars have been publishing books and research papers on eco-theory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, scholars began to work collectively in the mid 1980s to establish eco-criticism as a genre through Western Literature Association and other branches across the world.

In this paper, the focus is on how nature and literature always share a close relationship and it is evident in the works of poets and other writers down the ages in almost all cultures of the world. Indeed, the dynamic development of eco-criticism in literature, culture and ecology promises to provide long term innovational perspectives and how literature functions like an ecological force with the larger system of cultural discourses. Eco-criticism is considered a broad approach that is known by a number of other designations including green (cultural) studies, eco-poetics and environmental literary criticism. Let us investigate the depiction of nature in English literature in 19THand 20th centuries and the relationship between literature and the beautiful environment around us.