Ecocriticism and Modernism

Abstract

This article examines the historical relation between modernist studies and ecocriticism. It contends that modernist literature offers rich resources for ecocriticism because it responds to the changing environment of industrial modernity in ways that sometimes affirm but more often productively question conventional romantic and realist ideas about nature. It also argues that reading modernism ecocritically requires careful attention to how modernism’s adaptation or disruption of conventional literary forms contributes to its particular modes of ecological inquiry and critique and contends that it is important to develop a thoroughly historicized understanding of literary modernism’s relationship to romanticism, to the sciences, and to various forms of popular nature discourse.