ABSTRACT
Literary criticism has tended to be culturally contextual and uninterested in the non-human world, and narratological theory in particular subsumes this world under the term ‘setting’ in fiction. 1 This configuration relegates the space of the fictional story-world to the status of an inert background to the human action of the novel; it is the means by which the plot is furnished with objects, or is the extrapolation and exterior metaphorical expression of human passions and cultural and social structures. ‘Setting’ becomes a humanised wordscape that forgets, as Timothy Clark says, that ‘culture itself has a context’ — the meta-context of the biosphere, land, water, air, or what we more commonly call ‘nature’ or ‘the environment’ (2011:4). Emerging in the last twenty years, and contiguous with a ‘material turn’, ecocriticism is a form of literary criticism that has sought to retrieve this meta-context from the background to explore the poetics of its reproduction, representation and transfiguration, and the nature of humans in and with it. As Clark says, ecocriticism ‘does not write as if human beings were sole occupants of the planet’, and aims to ‘open itself to a space in which fundamental questions about the human place in nature are at issue’ (2011: 5).
