The Future of Environmental Criticism

This manifesto summarizes the disparate critical practices that constitute ecocriticism. Lawrence Buell, one of the world's leading theorists in ecocriticism, traces the ecocritical movement back to its roots in the 1970s, through its coalescence into a recognizable entity in the early 1990s, to its diversification and proliferation today. He shows how, from an initial focus on such genres as nature writing and nature poetry, ecocriticism has come to take all of literary history and discourse as its arena; and he addresses questions currently facing the discipline, such as: Why has the interest in environmental literary and cultural studies so quickly increased? Can the nature-preservation emphasis of first-wave ecocriticism be reconciled with second-wave concerns with issues of environmental justice? What is the meaning of place in a globalizing world? And how do aesthetic, ethical, and political concerns interact and collide in ecocritical work? Finally, Buell looks to the future of ecocriticism, predicting that discourses of the environment will become a permanent part of literary and cultural studies.