ABSTRACT
Writing an afterword makes one think long and hard on the virtues and vices of coming after something—of writing after the fact, and so being, part of a “post” script that exists as a tenuous addendum to the “real” thing (in this case, the excellent essays of this well-conceived collection), but also of writing from the position early modernists often find themselves in, writing about what seems a terribly remote and irrelevant past. The latter is a problem that has up to now defined a central controversy about our practice as early modern ecocritics: unlike past critical movements in the field, which were embraced early and thoroughly by early modernists—deconstruction, feminism, New Historicism, psychoanalytic criticism, and any number of other theoretical practices—ecocriticism has had a more difficult relationship. Where the environment is concerned, it seems we early modern ecocritics have arrived a bit late to the table. For many years, the Renaissance seemed to have little or nothing to offer ecostudies—this despite the fact that Lawrence Buell credits Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival as “the starting point for American ecocriticism proper,” with Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology, published almost 20 years later, only a belated co-originator. 1 At first, it seemed pre-Romantic literature could only demonstrate the absolute faith in human exceptionalism and exploitative dominance over nature that Lynn White Jr. described in his important essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” 2 As late as 2011, Julian Yates and Garrett Sullivan were still asking “How does the juxtaposition of our field of inquiry with the figure of ‘ecology’ reframe what it is we do?” because the answer to that question was so far from clear or settled (25). Even when a more complex picture emerged, early modern ecocritics worried that historical work could only imperfectly realize the presentist agenda of ecostudies, that it was not “activist” enough. Could it, asked Simon Estok in his own postscript to an earlier volume in the field, “be at all useful to contemporary environmental discussions?” (“Afterword” 239). 3 The belatedness of this new effort to mesh ecostudies with early modern studies seemed to require more justification than had past conjunctions of theory, literature, and history.
