Introduction: Early Modern Ecostudies

Abstract

Few cultural categories resist critical scrutiny more easily than nature. The word itself implies a concreteness beyond the reach of historical or human influence. “Natural” conveys authenticity, a realness apart from culture or opinion. A sentence that begins, “It is natural,” uses the word as a synonym for “logically” or “of course”—as if to say that what follows is self-evident. (“It is natural that women want babies, that people of the opposite sex attract,” and so on.) Nature implies imperviousness to change, it points to physical laws of the universe beyond human control. Few people think of nature, in short, as a cultural category at all. The problem of “nature” becomes particularly vexed in academic circles, as we turn to the rapidly evolving field of ecocriticism. Literary ecology, or “green” cultural criticism, examines “the relationship between literature and the physical environment.”1 But if one sees nature as a cultural category, the problems are immediately apparent in such a practice: how do we deal with literature, or works of the imagination, as part of the “physical” or nonhuman realm? In the introduction to a landmark collection of essays, The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty draws from the example of women’s studies, laying out three developmental stages. Ecocritics must first address images of nature, mapping the various stereotypes and changes in which the physical environment has been portrayed. The second step would be to recover a tradition (one Glotfetly immediately indicates begins around 1800 and which she loads heavily toward the present). Lastly, ecocritics need to theorize, “drawing on a wide range of theories to raise fundamental questions about… symbolic constructs.”2