ABSTRACT
As the outermost context, the adversarial context will often make significant changes to the meanings of the five inner contexts. Indeed, though a text may remain relatively stable, theories will always be shifting as they aim to answer the questions raised by our ever-changing contemporary concerns. As such, the adversarial context of ecocriticism reframes our close reading and changes the way we attend to the semantic, syntactic, thematic, iterative and generic contexts. Another contemporary adversarial context is intersectionality. Like ecocriticism, this approach has a long history, but it is only in recent years that it has become deployed in literary criticism. Critical race theory is closely related to intersectionality. One of the main themes of this approach is to examine the ubiquity of racism in a post-civil-rights context where racism may seem less obvious. Critical race theory forces us to look at thematic contexts that may appear marginal, or even absent, in a text and recontextualise our interpretation accordingly.
