Reading the Earth: Ecocriticism and Nature Writing in English Literature

Abstract

Ecocriticism, the study of the relationship between literature and the natural environment, has emerged over the past three decades as one of the most intellectually vital and politically urgent fields within English literary studies. Born from the recognition that the ecological crises of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, and environmental injustice, have profound cultural and imaginative dimensions that literary criticism is uniquely equipped to address, ecocriticism has expanded rapidly from a modest academic movement into a field of global reach and interdisciplinary ambition. This theoretical and literature review introduces undergraduate students to the historical origins, theoretical frameworks, and landmark literary texts of ecocriticism and the nature writing tradition in English. Drawing on the foundational contributions of Raymond Williams, Lawrence Buell, Greg Garrard, Rob Nixon, and Ursula Heise, and examining literary works by Gilbert White, William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Mary Oliver, Ted Hughes, Barry Lopez, Richard Powers, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, the review explores how literature has represented, constructed, and contested human relationships with the natural world across several centuries of English literary history. The paper argues that ecocriticism offers not merely a new set of readings of familiar texts but a fundamental reconceptualization of what literature is for at a moment of planetary ecological emergency.