Person:

Buell, Lawrence

This article analyzes representative topoi or traditions emanating from the so-called golden age of children’s writing in the late Victorian era that feature encounters with the physical environment. It traces the emergence of modern (Western) environmentally oriented children’s literature and examines the permutations of two overlapping topoi that have served as carriers of environmental concern since the late nineteenth century. It reviews works that purport to imagine nonhuman life-worlds from the standpoint of the creatures themselves and those that deal with the discovery or construction of special, often hidden outdoor places by children that are shown to have catalytic significance in bonding them to the natural environment.

Environmental humanists rightly believe they have valuable contributions to make to rethinking and redressing Anthropocene Age excess. Ecocriticism’s recent maturation as an interdiscipline has put it in a stronger position to do so than ever before. Its “material” turn in the 2000s bears this out up to a point, but its interventions also seem somewhat self-limiting. This essay argues that ecocritics and environmental humanists more generally have foregone a promising opportunity by avoiding the controversial issue of unsustainable human population growth as a sociohistorical phenomenon and an impetus to creative imagination.

Since prehistory, literature and the arts have been drawn to portrayals of physical environments and human-environment interactions. The modern environmentalist movement as it emerged first in the late-nineteenth century and, in its more recent incarnation, in the 1960s, gave rise to a rich array of fictional and nonfictional writings concerned with humans' changing relationship to the natural world. Only since the early 1990s, however, has the long-standing interest of literature studies in these matters generated the initiative most commonly known as “ecocriticism,” an eclectic and loosely coordinated movement whose contributions thus far have been most visible within its home discipline of literature but whose interests and alliances extend across various art forms and media. In such areas as the study of narrative and image, ecocriticism converges with its sister disciplines in the humanities: environmental anthropology, environmental history, and environmental philosophy. In the first two sections, we begin with a brief overview of the nature, significance, and evolution of literature-environment studies. We then summarize in more detail six specific centers of interest: (a) the imagination of place and place-attachment, (b) the enlistment and critique of models of scientific inquiry in the study of literature and the arts, (c) the examination of the significance of gender difference and environmental representation, (d) the cross-pollination of ecocritical and postcolonial scholarship as ecocriticism has extended its horizons beyond its original focus on Anglo-American imagination, (e) ecocriticism's evolving interest in indigenous art and thought, and (f) ecocri-ticism's no less keen and complex attentiveness to artistic representation and the ethics of relations between humans and animals.