This chapter surveys both the rich tradition of Renaissance botanical literature and some of the critical strategies currently developing around them: ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and critical plant studies. It focuses on the co-existence of myth and science in Renaissance botanical texts and the capacity of Renaissance literature to clarify the advantages and drawbacks of bestowing personhood on plants. Renaissance literature reveals the socio-political, intellectual, and aesthetic processes by which plants became hostage to two separate cultures: the scientific and aesthetic. The chapter also argues that a properly historicised view of Renaissance plant writing might in some respects make early modern texts more relevant to the present by reviving pre-Enlightenment worldviews and pre-Industrial notions of ecological enmeshment.

This chapter bridges environmental humanities and Black humanities by examining a figure largely, if curiously, excluded from the “ecocritical” canon: Charles Chesnutt, the first African American writer of commercially successful fiction. Reading literary environmentalism beyond the lenses of Romanticism or transcendentalism, Forbes finds in Chesnutt’s late nineteenth-century conjure tales a richly imagined Black environmental heritage that connected race and nature. Chesnutt’s short fiction featuring metamorphoses of humans into plants and animals represents a key node in an alternate, and nonlinear, Black environmentalist timeline. In contrast to environmentalisms that pit nature’s interests against humans’, the insights we see at flashpoints across this tradition, and crucially in Chesnutt’s conjure tales, belie narratives of human/nature separation that underpin most “white” environmentalisms. Moreover, his marshaling of racialized nonhuman agencies also helps us address persistent difficulties associated with new materialist theorizing. Fusing human/plant/animal agencies to frameworks of care and nurturance, characters in Chesnutt’s conjure tales weaponize “waste” against enslavement’s inhuman valuation systems.

This chapter adopts an Anthropocene framework to contextualize Gerard Manley Hopkins. Placing his work within the epoch of human geophysical agency, I argue, affords new perspective on his radical contribution as an ecological witness. It allows us to see that Hopkins’s depictions of natural entities involved an intuition about their embeddedness in larger systems, many inchoately explained by contemporary science; that his representations of non-human nature seldom avoided the ‘anthropos’ (the ‘human’ in Anthropocene), whether as destructive interloper or divinely privileged steward; and that his life and work included moments of prescience about human activity interfering with Earth-system processes. To recontextualize Hopkins thus is to furnish different ways to interpret his work (in wider conceptual networks and deeper time horizons) and to animate that work’s reception (in light of present concerns). It is also to affiliate Hopkins with ecopoets whose formal innovations might be fruitfully juxtaposed with his poetics.

The epilogue briefly considers Ovid’s exile poetry from an environmental and place-based perspective. Ovid demonstrates that environmental poetry does not need to rely on a positive attachment to a local land. His exile poetry is about and is marked by place, shaped by the location from which Ovid is estranged and the location in which he writes. Moreover, local place matters to Ovid as a particular more-than-human environment. Tomis is represented as an environment with its own specific geography, climate, and ecologies. Ovid further explores ecological themes by emphasizing the physical effects Tomis has on his body, through motifs of cold and sickness. The epilogue also uses Ovid’s exilic work to clarify the theoretical foundations of the environmental poetics identified in Vergil and Horace. Through his provocative play with intertextuality and fictionality, Ovid demonstrates that environmental poetics can rely not on realistic description or extratextual reference, but rather on the poetic imagination.

The introduction calls for a mutually enriching dialogue between ancient texts and environmental literary criticism, contextualizing the book in relation to ecocriticism and classical scholarship. It also establishes the key terms of the book’s approach – place, environment, and ecology – and distinguishes these from the unreflective use of the concept of nature. Finally, the introduction sketches the contextual background for Vergil’s and Horace’s environmental interests, noting a range of ancient traditions and discourses that took the nonhuman world seriously as a site of interest and inquiry. These include literary forebears like Sappho, Hesiod, Theocritus, and Lucretius; cultural traditions such as the Roman fascination with land surveying and agricultural treatises; political contexts like the expansion and consolidation of a quasi-global Roman empire; philosophical traditions from the Presocratics to Stoicism and Epicureanism; and religious traditions. Reading Horace and Vergil as environmental poets does not mean projecting modern sensibilities onto ancient texts but rather seeing how these authors pursue their own, different interests in place, ecology, and the environment.

This chapter explores the relationship between John Clare’s writing and the evolving discipline of ecocriticism which, in its broadest terms, treats literature as a representation of the physical world and the reader as a mediator between these complex environments. Clare’s work was central to the early ecocritical canon of the 1990s and continues, in more recent years, to shape our understanding of how and why environmental writing matters, particularly in a context of ecological despoliation, species extinction, and global warming. That Clare’s resolutely local voice and perspective should be at all relevant to an understanding of our broader world speaks to the challenge that he poses to modern readers by the example of his own relation to natural otherness. That relation, exemplified in poems such as ‘The Nightingales Nest’, is predicated on habits of attention and self-circumscription, a sequence by which the poet as ecological actor evokes the experience of coexistence.

This chapter introduces the concept of the proposed new geological epoch, and the main paradoxes and dilemmas that follow. The Anthropocene requires us simultaneously to see human beings as occupying a position of unprecedented responsibility for the ecosphere, and as a tragically blundering species, caught by the unforeseen consequences of previous actions. Further uncertainties derive from the current interim state in which urgent warnings coexist with stubborn normality. Ecological threats such as global warming and the extinction crisis defy representation because, in the words of Timothy Clark, they present us with ‘derangements of scale’, displacing the timescape of conventional narrative and challenging our habitual sense of what is trivial and what is important. Through close readings of essayists Kathleen Jamie, Jessica Gaitán Johannesson, Richard Smyth, Rebecca Tamás, and Jean Sprackland, the chapter examines the implications of these ideas for the form, style, and content of the contemporary environmental essay.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of how this project fits into the broader categories of critical eating studies and critical animal studies. Through a reading of Byron’s The Corsair, it offers an example of some of the book’s central arguments: that the development of vegetarianism and veganism must be understood as the result of an east–west dialogic relationship rather than as a one-way process of cultural transmission; that religion will often be used to explain away an individual’s dietary choice; that the connections with gender of vegetarianism and veganism are more complicated than has often been suggested.

This chapter focuses on the cultural transformations of Late Antiquity, using poems and letters produced between 300–600. Late Antique poets used rivers as ways of addressing changing religious, political, and religious identities, and to help them create new images of self and country. These early writers were responding to both literary and cultural rivers and to real encounters with river ecosystems. They shaped a sense of place and community alongside the rivers of Gaul, and their poetry reflects not only a sensitivity to the aesthetics of these riverscapes but also an awareness of the non-human world of river ecosystems. All told, Gallo-Roman poetry highlights an appreciation for the natural beauty of rivers, an awareness of their ecological abundance, and a recognition of the manifold ways in which human cultures, histories, and economies were drawn up in their watery webs.

The landscape – both its natural landmarks and architecture – serves as a public space of women’s genealogical record in the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman lives of Audrée, Osith, and Modwenne, contained in the Campsey manuscript, with all three texts invested in women’s kinships, succession, land uses, and geographical movement. This chapter explores how landmarks caused by the protagonists’ intimate, direct interaction with the land – here called “contact landmarks” – offer material proof of women’s legacies that do not involve, and even reject, biological or sexual relations. As Audrey, Osith, and Modwenna resist marriage and motherhood, they inscribe rock faces and church doors, create springs and islands, and inhabit transient water spaces, like rivers and pools, creating claims to space and time that reflect their independent lives and legacies. These landmarking acts are compared to descriptions of outdoor births and land-oriented birth visions in high medieval chronicles and hagiography and discussed in relation to Isabella of Arundel, a landowning widow who perhaps commissioned the manuscript.

Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang is a classic of politically aware American environmentalist fiction. While a literary descendant of Henry David Thoreau and a rough contemporary of figures such as Rachel Carson, Abbey’s politics are not entirely one with earlier nature writers and environmentalists. His novel is perhaps best known for bringing ecotage to the consciousness of a broad audience and inspiring such real-world actions as the political theater of groups such as Earth First. Some of the book’s success is certainly due to the degree to which it provokes critical reflection on problematic tensions in several areas central to environmentally conscious writing. One such tension is that which arises between, on the one hand, representations of environmental politics and, on the other, the politics of representations of nature. A second pertains to the question of the degree and manner in which issues of social justice intersect with environmentalist agendas. Along the way, the novel tests different models of ecological awareness, dramatizes the virtues and challenges of politically engaged grassroots environmentalism, and, perhaps especially due to its setting in the desert southwest, anticipates the increasingly urgent and globally relevant cluster of issues related to water rights, damming, and irrigation.

The 1890s have a special significance in the literary history of the Anthropocene, and the fin de siècle has traditionally been understood as a moment when artifice triumphed over nature. Reexamining the period today, we can instead see how literature and art of the 1890s reckons with the idea of an indeterminate nature without design, purpose, or end – a nature profoundly shaped by human forces and yet beyond human reckoning and control. The concentrated finitude of the era, as framed in literary and historical study, actually reflects the period’s own grasp of the finitudes and vicissitudes of the natural world. This chapter aims to tease out the environmental and ecological inheritance of the decadent 1890s while simultaneously teasing apart the complex conceptual contestation among rival assaults on the category of the “natural” in the 1890s, assaults that can be roughly grouped around Oscar Wilde’s 1895 denaturalizing of heterosexuality and Svante Arrhenius’s 1896 denaturalizing of the atmosphere in his landmark essay “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.”

In this introduction to Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s, the editors, Dustin Friedman and Kristin Mahoney, situate the contents of the collection in relationship to the larger objectives of the Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition series, which aims to move beyond existing preconceptions of individual decades within the nineteenth century by producing new characterizations enabled by recent critical methodologies. This volume highlights in particular the role that work attending to the transnational, ecocriticism, digital humanities, and new approaches to gender and sexuality might play in reshaping our understanding of a period often referred to as “the Naughty Nineties.” This work, the editors argue, enhances our understanding of the nineteenth century’s closing years in their full complexity, dynamism, and intellectual ferment and makes a case for the relevance of perspectives from the 1890s regarding issues that still preoccupy us today.

Modernist American writers and artists had multiple and often conflictual responses toward the many environmental issues that became a growing concern as a result of rapid modernization at the outset of the twentieth century. Few artists in the modernist period avowedly declared themselves to be environmentalists or subscribed to what came later to be defined as being “green.” This chapter examines methods used especially in recent years by scholars in studying the range of environmental matters of form and content in modernism. Close readings are provided of important texts by Zora Neale Hurston and John Steinbeck as examples of how to apply these ecocritical research methods.