1. TOPIC
ECO-CRITICISM
• Name:- Sejal Chauhan
• Paper:- 7 – Literary Theory & Criticism
• Roll No:- 28
• M.A. Part-1 Sem-2
• Year:- 2013-15
• Submitted to:- Smt. S.B.Gardi
Department of English
M.K.Bhavnagar University.

2. What is Eco-Criticism ?
• Eco-Criticism is the study of the relationship
between literature and the physical environment.
• Just as feminist criticism examines language and
literature from a gender conscious perspective, and
Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of
production and economic class to its reading of
texts, eco-criticism takes an earth centered
approach to literary studies.

3. Pollution and
Apocalypse
Ex- Silent Spring
by
Rachel Carson
Pastoral and
Wilderness
Ex- Heart of
Darkness
By
Joseph Conrad
Dwelling and The
Earth
Ex- Dwelling
Places by
Vinita Hampt
Animals and
Plants(flora and
fauna)
Ex- Robinson
Crusoe by
Daniel Defoe

4. Ecocritics ask questions like:
(1)How is
nature
represented
in this
sonnet?
(2) What role
does the
physical
setting play in
the plot of
this novel?
(3) Are the
values
expressed in this
play consistent
with ecological
wisdom?

5. (4) How do our
metaphors of
the land
influence the
way we treat it?
(5) How can we
characterize
nature writing
as a genre?

6. In addition to race ,
class, and gender,
should place
become a new
critical category?
Do men write
about nature
differently than
women do?
In what ways has
literary itself
affected
humankind’s
relationship to the
natural world?
How has the
concept of
wilderness
changed
overtime?

7. Interconnect
ion
Nature
Culture

8. Share
Human
culture
connected
Physical
world
Affected it
& affected
by it Ecolo
gical
Critici
sm

9. (1) How Women are
represented in
literature.
(2) The important
function of
consciousness raising
as it rediscovers,
reissues and
reconsiders literature
by Women.
(1) How nature is
represented in
literature.
(2) Eco criticism
reconsiders neglected
genre of nature
writing.
(3) Questions about
the symbolic
construction of
gender and sexuality
within literary
discourse.
(3) Eco critics includes
examining the
symbolic construction
of species. How has
literary discourse
defined the human?
Feminism and
Eco criticism

10. • We know that we are facing a global crisis
today, not because of how eco systems
function but rather because of how our ethical
system function.
• It requires understanding those ethical
systems and using that understanding to
reform them.

11. • Gerard Manley Hopkins:
“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wildeness yet.”

12. Examples
• James Thomson’s The Seasons and in the widely
practiced genre called nature writing.
• Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of
Selborne.
• Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.
• Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring ,concerning the
devastation inflicted by newly developed chemical
pesticides on wildlife, both on land and in water.

13. Examples
 Joni Adamson’s ,
• American Indian Literature
• Environmental Justice
• Ecocriticism: The Middle Place.
 Donelle N. Dreese’s
• Ecocriticism: Creating Self and Place in Environmental
• American Indian Literature

14.  Some books that were important in the founding and
development of ecocriticism.
• Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the
Pastoral Ideal in America (1964)
• Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind
• Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological
Ideas (1977)
• John Elder, Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of
Nature (1985)
• Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization
(1992)
• Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination
• Thoreau’s , Nature Writing, and the Formation of American
Culture (1995).

15. conclusion
• Eco critics encourage others to think seriously
about the relationship of humans to nature,
about the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas
posed by the environmental crisis and about
how language and literature transmit values
with profound ecological implications.

16. Thank you