ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book identifies and traces avant-garde communication frameworks within broad genres such as climate discourse, science writing, animal narratives, and narratives of slow violence. It demonstrates how environmental communication concerns apply to visual texts, taking as his primary subject Thomas Cole’s famous painting The Oxbow and proposing that “directionality” might serve as a helpful term for ecocritical analysis. The book focuses on ecocritical reading of culturally distinctive approaches to environmental communication in literature and other media of environmental expression. The environmental approach to literature—and soon thereafter to other artistic media and popular culture—began to receive widespread public attention in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia in the mid-1990s, coinciding with the publication of The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, in 1996.
