ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates how green readings can foreground important environmental insights that exist within modernist literature and, in turn, affirm the importance of modernism as a central subject of ecocritical enquiry. It refers particularly to inclusive and expansive ethos of British ecocriticism and uses some of its key critical texts as a guide to approaching modernism. The book discusses the historical, critical and theoretical context of both modernist studies and ecocriticism to establish why a dialogue between the two is now both possible and beneficial. It focuses on the importance of nature, place and the environment to British modernist poetry, especially in the work of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew. The book examines Mew's depiction of the experience of urban and rural life from perspective of marginalised individuals who feel more closely aligned to non-human than human world.
