SOURCE: Mazel, David. Introduction to A Century of Early Ecocriticism, edited by David Mazel, pp. 1‐17. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.

[In the following excerpt, Mazel traces the history of ecocriticism, discussing twentieth‐century critics' unearthing of environmental concerns in literature and focusing especially on their reading of nineteenth‐century American writing.]

That which was unconscious truth, becomes, when interpreted and defined in an object, a part of the domain of knowledge,—a new weapon in the magazine of power.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Ecocriticism—the study of literature as if the environment mattered—has only recently come to recognize itself as a distinct critical enterprise. The term itself apparently dates no further back than 1978, when it was coined by William Rueckert.¹ Of course, in such a rapidly changing field as literary studies, 1978 can seem like a long time ago, and a twenty‐year history can confer a quite respectable pedigree. This is the sense I got when Cheryll Glotfelty wrote, in The Ecocriticism Reader (1996), that “individual literary and cultural scholars have been developing ecologically informed criticism and theory since the seventies” and that therefore the “origin of ecocriticism … predates its recent consolidation by more than twenty years.”² It was as if those twenty years lent the field the sort of legitimacy The Ecocriticism Reader itself has done so much to establish.

Many of us have suspected, however, that ecocriticism actually boasts a much longer history. After all, the environment has mattered to Americans, in many of the same ways it matters today, for more than a century. Surely among the nation's numerous early environmentalists there must have been an occasional literary critic whose concern for nature was reflected in an occasional essay or book. Nature writing itself is even older—more than two centuries old, if we date it from the 1789 publication of Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne—and surely it must have come now and then to the attention of a literary critic and prompted a de facto ecocriticism.

Just as nature writing and environmentalism predate Earth Day, so must a kind of ecocriticism predate the essays of Glen Love, William Rueckert, Joseph Meeker, and Lynn White Jr. In searching for such work … I quickly realized that I would need a working definition. Just what is ecocriticism? I have already offered one formulation above, but there are others. In The Ecocriticism Reader, for example, Glotfelty defines it as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment.” In much the same way that “feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender‐conscious perspective,” she continues, “and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an earth‐centered approach to literary studies.” No matter how it is defined, ecocriticism seems less a singular approach or method than a constellation of approaches, having little more in common than a shared concern with the environment. It can address itself to a wide range of questions, including but hardly limited to these: “How is nature represented in this sonnet? What role does the physical setting play in the plot of this novel? Are the values expressed in the play consistent with ecological wisdom? … How has the concept of wilderness changed over time?”³

Clearly, a broad range of work may legitimately be thought of as ecocriticism. … [I count] as “ecocriticism” any material that might be of special interest not only to scholars but to all who share a love for both literature and the environment. … As Glotfelty notes, ecocriticism necessarily encompasses both a “broad scope of inquiry and disparate levels of sophistication.”⁴ …

Prior to the emergence of environmental literary studies as an academic field in the late 1980s, there was no discourse of ecocriticism per se. What ecocriticism there was necessarily appeared elsewhere, typically as part of the more general discourses of nature writing, scholarship and criticism, and environmentalism. Unlike today's ecocriticism, which seems so clearly an offshoot of the environmental awareness of the 1960s and 1970s, … early ecocriticism … seems to have been prompted only indirectly by environmentalism itself. In the United States, at least, it was much more directly a response to two separate developments. Outside the colleges and universities, ecocriticism appeared in response to the burgeoning popularity of nature writing; within the academy, it arose largely out of what might be termed disciplinary politics, a by‐product of the emergence of American literature as an academic discipline.

In the United States a recognizable ecocriticism first arose in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as criticism in general was beginning to undergo two major changes. Academic criticism at the time was dominated by “men of letters,” genteel critics such as Harvard's James Russell Lowell—writers who were broadly “cultured” rather than narrowly specialized. Their work, like that of their nonacademic but equally genteel counterparts, appeared in a small cluster of highbrow magazines, most notably the Atlantic. The dominant mode of criticism was a Matthew Arnold‐style humanism, and Boston was its geographical center. Toward the end of the century, however, fundamental demographic and economic changes tilted the balance of cultural power away from an increasingly provincial Boston—which had given us writers such as Emerson and Thoreau in addition to such critics as Lowell—toward a more cosmopolitan New York, which could boast of such writers as Walt Whitman and John Burroughs, and later of such critics as Van Wyck Brooks and H. L. Mencken.⁵

At the same time, the American university was being modernized along the lines of the increasingly prestigious German “research model.” Where once the mission of the university had been the preservation and transmission of knowledge (and, less officially, the reproduction of existing social hierarchies), that mission more and more emphasized the production of knowledge. One result of the ensuing professionalization of academic letters was a profound split between the older, belletristic “critic” and the new, objectively scientific “scholar.” As an academic discipline, literary scholarship came to concern itself primarily with etymology and literary history, with the painstaking accumulation of linguistic and literary‐historical facts.

Such scholarship was in step with the new emphasis on scientific rigor, but it gave short shrift to what we think of today as criticism. The academic scholar did not make and defend judgments about the meaning and value of literary works or examine the unspoken underpinnings of such judgments, much less use literature as a springboard for reflecting critically on culture and society. The scholar was likely to consider such criticism hopelessly subjective, a kind of dilettantism unworthy of the true academic. When the Modern Language Association was chartered in 1883 as part of this professionalizing of literary studies, it reflected the literary‐historical bias of the new research model. Criticism rarely appeared in its flagship journal, Publications of the Modern Language Association.

By the turn of the century, literary criticism had nearly been expunged from the universities. It took refuge in the classier commercial magazines, which venue continued for a time to be dominated by the Arnoldian “men of letters.” Increasingly, however, and from both sides of the political spectrum, their traditional humanism would be challenged. On the right were the so‐called New Humanists, which included disaffected academics like Harvard's Irving Babbitt and Princeton's Paul Elmer More. These traditionalists disdained what they saw as the sterile positivism of the research university and championed a renewed emphasis on the classics, believing, as David Shumway has put it, that the only worthwhile literary tradition “began with the Greeks and ended in the Renaissance.” On the left were the “literary radicals,” critics like Van Wyck Brooks and Randolph Bourne who hoped to enlist literature—including the most contemporary of American works—in the aid of a progressive politics. Where the New Humanists might champion Virgil, Spenser, and Milton, the radicals were more likely to weigh in on behalf of Stephen Crane and Upton Sinclair.⁶

What united these two groups, and set them apart from the academic scholars, was their concern with contemporary culture, mores, and politics. (The latter could include environmental politics, though at this time it rarely did so.) For both groups, and for those who belonged to neither, the authority to pontificate on such issues typically derived not from an academic post but from a literary reputation or a position as an editor.⁷ The ecocritical pronouncements of John Burroughs, for example, carried weight primarily because of his status as a best‐selling nature writer; those of Hamilton Wright Mabie were underwritten both by the popularity of his books and by his clout as an editor at magazines like the Christian Century and Ladies' Home Journal.

By the turn of the century there was a small but growing body of de facto ecocriticism, but for the most part it was rooted outside the American academy. This was the situation in 1921, when Norman Foerster and several other university professors formed the American Literature Group as one of the new divisions of the Modern Language Association. Even at this late date the idea that the United States even had a literature was not self‐evident—at least to the professional scholars of the MLA—and one of the first tasks of the ALG was to establish just what comprised “American literature” to begin with. The subject could not be taken seriously as an academic discipline without an American literature as a discrete object of study, a recognizably American literature that was more than just a minor branch of English letters.

The academic scholarship of the day was ill‐suited for legitimizing the nascent field of American literature. What was needed was not the accumulation of more facts but the demonstration of some distinctive cultural pattern in American writing that set it apart from its British antecedents. As a member of the New Humanist group—a university professor, but a critic at heart—Foerster was qualified for this task, capable of asking questions that transcended the narrowly positivistic confines of scholarly research: Is our national literature recognizably American in some way? If it is, what makes it so? Crucial to answering those questions, Foerster argued, were the American experience of the frontier and the closely related experience of New World nature. It was only by reading literature as if nature mattered—by practicing an early ecocriticism—that American literary criticism came to be professionalized, and it is no coincidence at all that Foerster inaugurated the new academic field with a study titled Nature in American Literature (1923).⁸

Though their championing of American literature helped reform a generally conservative academic literary culture, Foerster and the ALG remained decidedly conservative in other ways. For one thing, many Americanists remained methodologically committed to the research model. (In practice the putative “objectivity” of the scholar remained quite valuable, insofar as it permitted what was really the invention of an American literary tradition to be presented as the discovery of such a tradition.) For another, the profession's newfound receptivity to things American owed less to any liberalizing of the academy than it did to the patriotic atmosphere following World War I. Certainly Nature in American Literature did not signal the academy's political engagement with the world at large, nor was the book's focus on nature prompted in any immediate way by environmentalism.

When reading work such as Foerster's today, it is important to remember this essential conservatism. To the extent that Foerster engaged in a bona fide criticism, it was generally in the spirit of the New Humanism, which had long epitomized the “right wing of literary culture.”⁹ The development of a genuinely hermeneutic approach to criticism in the academy—a criticism concerned with the significance of literary works—had to wait for the rise of the New Criticism in the 1930s. The New Critics were critics in the modern sense; they did not consider their central task to be the discovery of facts but the interpretation of texts. Literature was conceived to be the bearer of subtle, complex meanings that were not at all self‐evident and whose elucidation required “close reading” of the text itself rather than meticulous research in libraries and archives. New Critics did not so much prove their conclusions in the cautious manner of the literary historian; rather they argued for them—and in doing so had to justify the underpinnings of their arguments. Thus in addition to moving the academy from scholarship to criticism the New Critics helped introduce the wave of literary theorizing that remains with us.

What is most notable for our purposes about the New Critics is how little attention they paid to the natural environment. After all, one might reasonably have expected something like an ecocriticism to have emerged from this group's deep dissatisfaction with industrialism. The Agrarians—a loosely affiliated group of disaffected Southerners that included such New Critics as Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom—vigorously bemoaned how the “headlong race for mastery over nature … stifled the aesthetic impulse, rendered impotent the religious impulse, and converted man's days into a frantic and frenzied drive for the often tawdry experiences of modernism.”¹⁰ Yet they consistently limited the evils of industrialism to the social rather than the ecological, and the famous “Statement of Principles” that opens the Agrarian manifesto, I'll Take My Stand (1930), does not list environmental degradation among the many lamentable consequences of the new economic order.

The same environmental indifference characterizes the so‐called New York Intellectuals, writers like Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin who at this time represented the left wing of literary criticism and who opposed the New Critics on almost every other issue. The New York Intellectuals were also vehement critics of industrial capitalism—but they, too, failed to produce much of anything resembling an environmentally informed criticism. “The world” to which they felt literature to be so profoundly related was again the social and not the natural world.

The situation in the years following Nature in American Literature was thus one in which those who attended to nature did not do much criticism, while those who did do criticism did not attend much to nature. Not until 1941, with the appearance of F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance, would the two major strands—a genuinely critical methodology and an attention to nature as a literary theme—be brought together and systematically applied to American writing. Adverting frequently to American writers' treatment of nature, Matthiessen argued brilliantly for the organic unity, and hence for the literary value, of nineteenth‐century American literature. In doing so he almost single‐handedly established the now‐familiar Americanist canon—centered on Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman—that has only recently been contested and revised. American Renaissance convinced the academy for the first time to adopt a recognizably modern approach to American literature; as was the case with Nature in American Literature, the work that ushered in the new regime featured a good deal of ecocriticism.

The same can be said of the next major advance in the academic study of American literature, the emergence of American Studies out of the patriotic crucible of the Cold War. It is again no coincidence that two of the new discipline's foundational texts—Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land (with chapters such as “The Innocence and Wildness of Nature”) and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden—based their arguments on extended analyses of American views of nature. Just as American literature had earlier needed to distinguish itself from its English antecedents, so American Studies had to distinguish itself from a nascent cultural studies by establishing the “Americanness” of American culture—and this could most readily be done by foregrounding the nation's reaction to the radical transformation of its once wild environment. As Shumway observes, Marx used this approach to particularly good effect when he argued for an American version of the pastoral: “By placing American works in the context of a tradition that goes back to classical antiquity and includes a great many British poets,” he writes, “Marx elevates the status of American literature. By arguing that the impingement of industrialism becomes the particular problem of the American pastoral, Marx demonstrates the distinctiveness of American literature.”¹¹

What I have been arguing is that, prior to the great upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, each major development in the academic criticism of American letters has been enabled by a kind of proto‐ecocriticism. Though still viewed in many academic circles as a marginal and dubious subfield of professional literary studies,¹² ecocriticism has in fact been central and determinative. Without it, our sense of “American literature” might not exist at all.

During all this time, other stands of ecocriticism were evolving outside the academy, partly in response to the exploding popularity of nature writing, and less directly in response to the growth of environmental awareness. The histories of both nature writing and environmentalism have been treated thoroughly elsewhere;¹³ what I wish to discuss briefly here is the degree to which an early sort of ecocriticism closely attended, and in a sense made possible, the birth of modern environmentalism itself. Many date that birth to the 1864 publication of George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature—the book that first documented the scope and seriousness of human degradation of the natural environment and that decisively influenced several early environmentalists, including John Muir.¹⁴ Even a casual reading of Man and Nature suggests that Marsh did not reach and probably could not have reached his conclusions by observing nature alone; his argument necessarily hinged also on his reading of texts. To make his environmentalist case, Marsh had to demonstrate long‐term ecological change, to compare environmental conditions past and present, and the science of his day could not provide the necessary historical data. It was only by scouring a wide variety of classical and historical writings for what they revealed about former ecological conditions—by practicing the sort of ecocriticism later performed on a much smaller scale by Aldo Leopold in “The Forestry of the Prophets” (1920)—that Marsh could frame his contemporary observations as evidence of ecological damage.

This proto‐ecocriticism suffuses Man and Nature, though it is too desultory to excerpt in this collection. Much of it appears in Marsh's notoriously copious footnotes, in which he cites and analyzes dozens of travel narratives, natural histories, and literary classics. He industriously ferrets out the ecological data recorded—however incidentally—by such disparate authors as the ancient Greeks, Raphael Holinshed, Edmund Spenser, Alexander von Humboldt, Timothy Dwight, George Sand, Henry Thoreau; the list goes on and on. After noting, for example, that the “most important, as well as the most trustworthy conclusions with respect to the climate of ancient Europe and Asia, are those drawn from the accounts given by the classical writers,” he analyzes Pliny's Naturalis Historiae and reveals an early awareness of both ecological damage and its causes: “Destructive torrents,” writes Pliny, “are generally formed when hills are stripped of the trees which formerly confined and absorbed the rains.”¹⁵

As evidence for the species diversity of sixteenth‐century British forests, Marsh quotes stanzas such as this from the “catalogue of trees” in the first canto of the “Faerie Queen”:

The laurell, meed of mightie conquerours
And poets sage; the firre that weepeth still;
The willow, worne of forlorn paramours;
The eugh, obedient to the benders will;
The birch for shaftes; the sallow for the mill;
The mirrhe sweete‐bleeding in the bitter wound;
The warlike beech; the ash for nothing ill;
The fruitfull olive; and the platane round;
The carver holme; the maple seeldom inward sound.

Elsewhere, in a particularly garrulous note, Marsh cites Holinshed's famed Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. Where Shakespeare had mined this volume for raw material for his history plays, Marsh examines it for hints of trouble in England's ecological past: “[William] Harrison, in his curious chapter ‘Of Woods and Marishes’ in Holinshed's compilation, complains of the rapid decrease of the forests”; Harrison adds that because the “woods go so fast to decaie” he would like to require “that auerie man, in whatsoeuer part of the champaine soile enioineth fortie acres of land, and vpwards … might plant one acre of wood, or sowe the same with oke mast, hasell, beech, and sufficient prouision be made that it may be cherished and kept.’” Still elsewhere, Marsh bases his argument quite ingeniously on his expertise in etymology, inferring changes in the landscape from changes in the meanings of words. The various Swedish terms for swamp, he notes, distinguish finely between lands that “are grass‐grown, and overflowed with water through almost the whole summer,” those that “are covered with mosses and always moist, but very seldom overflowed,” and so on. Tracing the history and geographic distribution of such terms through the local literature provides clues about a region's changing hydrology and ecology.¹⁶

In each of the examples above, Marsh reads his primary texts as if nature mattered, and motivating him to do so is a profound concern for the deteriorating physical environment. Thus he is not only one of our earliest and most influential environmentalists but also one of our first ecocritics. Modern environmentalism owes as much as American literature to the practice of early ecocriticism.

Notes

1. The essay is William Rueckert's “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,” Iowa Review 9 (Winter 1978): 71‐86. Reprinted in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Harold Fromm and Cheryll Glotfelty (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 105‐23. Six years earlier, Joseph Meeker had used the parallel term “literary ecology” in his The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (New York: Scribner's, 1972).

2. Fromm and Glotfelty, xvi and xviii.

3. Ibid., xviii and xix.

4. Ibid., xix.

5. David Shumway, Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 30‐31; see also 41‐45. The discussion that follows is deeply indebted to Shumway's study of the professionalizing of the criticism of American literature.

6. Ibid., 53‐56.

7. Ibid., 120.

8. Ibid., 134. The role of the frontier experience in creating a distinctively American culture is more complex than I've indicated here. Shumway notes Foerster's claim that the frontier experience turned Americans toward a raw materialism and away from the imaginative pursuits needed to create a distinctive national culture; ironically, as more and more writers bemoaned this state of affairs, that lack of culture itself became a distinctively American motif. “In Foerster,” writes Shumway, “the problem of a national culture is already on its way to becoming a theme in the American tradition, in other words, an aspect of national culture” (134). The defining theme is less nature itself, that is, than the perceived failure of American letters to respond adequately to nature.

9. Ibid., 227.

10. Louis D. Rubin Jr., introduction to I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners (New York: Harper, 1962), xiii.

11. Shumway, 330.

12. Many contemporary literary critics suspect—wrongly, in my view—that ecocriticism's focus on “nature” functions to reify various politically obnoxious forms of essentialism. It was not until December 1998, “[a]fter a six year battle” with such critics, that the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment was accepted as an Allied Group of the Modern Language Association.

13. See, for example, Paul Brooks, Speaking for Nature: How Literary Naturalists from Henry Thoreau to Rachel Carson Have Shaped America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), and Hans Huth, Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972).

14. See Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865‐1895 (New York: Dover, 1931). Mumford writes that Marsh “was the first man to sense the destruction that was being wrought, to weigh its appalling losses, and to point out an intelligent course of action” (72). In addition Marsh was among the first to consider “man as an active geological agent … who upset the harmonies of nature and overthrew the stability of existing arrangements and accommodations, extirpating indigenous vegetable and animal species, introducing foreign varieties, restricting spontaneous growth, and covering the earth with ‘new and reluctant vegetable forms and with alien tribes of animal life’” (76‐77). For all these reasons, Mumford concludes that Man and Nature “was the fountainhead of the conservation movement” (78). David Lowenthal, in his introduction to the book, notes that it was “the beginning of land wisdom in this country” and that it “directly inspired the 1873 memorial which led Congress to establish a national forestry commission and government forestry reserves.” George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), xxii.

15. Marsh, 22 and 188.

16. Ibid., 31, 192, and 264.