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...