Ecocriticism: Old and New Challenges
Physical landscapes and human-environment interactions have long been portrayed in literature and the arts. The modern environmentalist movement, which first appeared in the late nineteenth century and which gained traction in the 1960s, has resulted in a wide variety of fictional and nonfiction works addressing the evolving interaction between humans and the natural world. However, it was only in the early 1990s that “ecocriticism” emerged as a self-conscious critical practice, one that has gone through a variety of designations: environmental criticism, literary-environmental studies, literary ecology, literary environmentalism, green cultural studies or, more recently, environmental humanities.