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.

Even when valorized for a political imagination that drew attention to the marginalized spaces and communities of a rapidly changing postbellum United States, regionalism (or “local color”) literature was long considered to be merely minor: written from and about sites marginal to the centers of culture and power, primarily by women, and appearing most prominently in the modest form of the short story or sketch. This essay reframes the regionalist short story through a renewed attention to its environmental representation, especially by attending to the genre’s questions of scale: the relation between region, nation, and globe; modernity and its relationship to a preindustrial past; the limitations and constraints of a minor form. Through discussions of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Murfree, Bret Harte, and others, this essay argues that the regionalist short story’s environmental imagination decenters the human, while also revealing the co-constitution of a region and its literary archive.

This chapter discusses Rushdie’s work in the context of ecocritical considerations, which have increasingly preoccupied critics in the age of the Anthropocene. The representations of Rushdie’s urban and rural environments directly intersect with issues around environmental toxification, droughts, and famines. This is explored through urban planning and the spectre of postcolonial developmental policies, through, for example, the building of hydroelectric dams. Yet Rushdie brings to these considerations a further dimension in his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, where these issues take most prominence. The metaphors of ground splitting, earthquakes, and environmental disaster are here closely intertwined. Shalimar the Clown engages with the toxification of the Kashmir valley through military hardware, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, featuring a gardener as its central character, also considers the post-apocalyptic world of New York, when the known world is altered after New York is hit by a storm. This little explored aspect of Rushdie’s work opens up a new critical conceptual dimension and illuminates important environmental concerns of his later novels.

Chapter 5 illuminates the literary, political, and ecological significance of Milton’s depiction of contentment. In Eikonoklastes, Milton responds directly to the appropriation of contentment discourse in Eikon Basilike. Charles I had identified his opponents as malcontents and positioned himself as a contented martyr-king. By contrast, Milton describes Charles’s discontent as the immediate cause of the English Civil War and as the epitome of tyranny. In Paradise Lost, he adds an environmental dimension to the religious and republican significances of content and discontent. The language of self-containment has limited applications for unfallen Adam and Eve, who interact harmoniously with their environment. Satanic discontent reconstitutes the experience of selfhood as a space defined in opposition to the natural world. Satan perverts contentment and finds it impossible to relate to the world around him in any way other than as a conqueror. When Adam and Eve choose to sin, they emulate diabolic discontent and subject all of creation to imperialism. Milton’s revision of Christian contentment reveals his efforts to endure, lament, and resist the Restoration.

This introduction asks what Darwin’s writings still offer to contemporary criticism and humanist thought, highlighting the implications of his work on ecologies, human difference, and aesthetics.

This chapter discusses a bilingual poem in Quechua and Spanish by the twentieth-century Peruvian writer, Teodoro Meneses Morales (1915-87). It argues that the poem evinces a loss of solidarity between humanity and the wider cosmos and that this loss is the result of social, cultural, and environmental transitions occurring at the time. By synthesizing Cornejo Polar’s concept of heterogeneity with Westphal’s geocritical approach, the chapter develops a theoretical framework that accounts for how transitions in mid-twentieth-century Peruvian society disrupt normal patterns of relating to the natural environment as reflected in the poem. As humanity becomes ever more fragmented, pulled in opposing directions between traditional Andean and Western ways of relating to the land, so the land itself ceases to be the stable environment that it was before. In Meneses Morales’ poem, the emblem of such transformations is a drought. While far from unprecedented in the Andes, in a context of heterogeneity this natural disaster becomes symbolic of a more fundamental dislocation between the human inhabitant and the wider landscape of which humans form a part.

This chapter discusses a bilingual poem in Quechua and Spanish by the twentieth-century Peruvian writer, Teodoro Meneses Morales (1915-87). It argues that the poem evinces a loss of solidarity between humanity and the wider cosmos and that this loss is the result of social, cultural, and environmental transitions occurring at the time. By synthesizing Cornejo Polar’s concept of heterogeneity with Westphal’s geocritical approach, the chapter develops a theoretical framework that accounts for how transitions in mid-twentieth-century Peruvian society disrupt normal patterns of relating to the natural environment as reflected in the poem. As humanity becomes ever more fragmented, pulled in opposing directions between traditional Andean and Western ways of relating to the land, so the land itself ceases to be the stable environment that it was before. In Meneses Morales’ poem, the emblem of such transformations is a drought. While far from unprecedented in the Andes, in a context of heterogeneity this natural disaster becomes symbolic of a more fundamental dislocation between the human inhabitant and the wider landscape of which humans form a part.

Wallace’s landscapes are haunted by capitalist interventions in the natural world, from the black sand of the Great Ohio Desert to the Great Convexity/Concavity that sits like a pustule between the United States and Canada. This chapter considers Wallace’s writing as an ecocritical gesture that connects human solipsism, hypercapitalism and the despoiling of the natural world. In tracing this connection, the chapter operates on the central theme of disgust, a recurrent and powerful motif throughout Wallace’s body of work. Working alongside the chapter on regional geographies, the chapter shows how Wallace troubled and complicated the regional archetypes that populate his writing by using images of the unheimlich and the grotesque, uniting the threatening, the decomposing and the simply absurd to highlight the depredations of the late capitalist system on the (American) landscape.

Hal Incandenza, early in Infinite Jest, has a dream of a tennis court that is dauntingly “complex,” with “lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems.” Among other meanings, this court is an image of Wallace’s complex narratives themselves, landscapes that juxtapose the regulating and other effects of systems of information, computing, government, ecology and more. This essay attempts to ground Wallace’s corpus in the systems novel, a category applied by critic Tom LeClair to the postmodern novelists that most inspired him, including Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy and William Gaddis. The essay will focus its readings on Wallace’s last two novels, Infinite Jest and The Pale King, and draw briefly on archival evidence at the Ransom Center that Wallace learned much about the systems novel’s grand ambitions from not just Don DeLillo’s works but the discussion of Gregory Bateson and other systems theorists in LeClair’s In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel.