The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism

Rating:
Summary: Key readings on 'nature' and 'culture'
Review: This is a very welcome reader in 'green' cultural studies that includes but goes well beyond 'ecocriticism', as narrowly confined to a subdiscipline of English literature. Its stated aim is 'to stimulate debate about the 'nature' of criticism and to give green studies some much-needed bearings'(Preface).

The readings included are wide ranging, and are organised in three loosely chronological sections: Green Tradition, Green Theory and Green Reading. They have been chosen to help the reader come to terms with the age-old relationship between 'nature' and 'culture', which Jonathan Bate claims in his Foreword to be 'the key intellectual problem of the twentieth century'.

Ecocriticism is better established in the United States than in Britain. This has resulted in two related problems. First, texts on ecocriticism have up to now tended to focus on American literature and theory. Second, North Atlantic ecocriticism has not engaged with (non-English) European thought as thoroughly as it might. The Green Studies Reader goes some way towards remedying these 'faults'. While it is still firmly focussed on Anglo-American literature, (and film), it includes significant readings from key French and German thinkers.

This book is an important, even crucial, read for anyone interested in the ways in which planetary life might at last take 'its rightful place at the centre of that discipline which we might still call, though with appropriate hesitation, the humanities' (Introduction).