thomas m wilson

Ecocriticism

I wrote the following at the end of 2005.  This page is mainly for academics and academic students of literature. Ecocriticism is literary criticism which is concerned with nature writing and ecological themes in all literature. If you’re after some actual nature writing, check out the nature related writings I’ve included on my page ‘wisdom’.

What follows is a list of the best books I encountered – in the four or five years leading up to the end of 2005 – of reading ecocritical works.

My ecocritical study of the work of John Fowles is published by Rodopi.

TOM WILSON’S ECOCRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY:

  • Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London: Routledge, 1991.
  • — The Song of the Earth. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002.
  • Begiebing, Robert J. and Grumbling, Owen. (eds.), ‘Twentieth Century British Nature Writing, The Tradition Endures’, Medford, NJ: Plexus, 1990, p.452.
  • Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995.
  • –‘The Ecocritical Insurgency’, New Literary History, 30 (1999), 699-712.
  • —Writing for an Endangered World. Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001.
  • Carroll, Joseph. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. London: Routledge, 2004.
  • Coupe, Lawrence. ed. The Green Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2000.
  • Fowles, John. The Tree. New York: The Ecco Press, 1979.
  • Gifford, Terry. Pastoral. London: Routledge, 1999.
  • —Reconnecting with John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2006.
  • Love, Glen. Practical Ecocriticism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.
  • Marinelli, Peter V. Pastoral. London: Methuen & Co, 1971.
  • Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.
  • Midgley, Mary. Science and Poetry. London: Routledge, 2001.
  • Snyder, Gary. ‘Language Goes Two Ways’, A Place in Space, Washington D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995, pp.173-80.
  • ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment [This is the peer-reviewed academic journal for ecocriticism.]

Australian criticism on environmental literature

In my view Australian literary criticism has yet to produce a great deal of first-rate ecologically themed work about our home.  Check my CV for a link to my own ecocritical survey of Australian poetry.