ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers a space in which to complicate and move beyond Joseph Meeker’s comic eco-hero and evolutionary narrative to reveal the complex ways environmental comedies present their eco-points. It reveals how the mythology of the “green world” from medieval and Renaissance literature develops and evolves in relation to genre and cultural contexts of the comic mode. The book explains the continuing power of the comic eco-hero and comic evolutionary narratives in eco-comedy films. It explains characters who serve both a comic purpose and a satirical premise and plot and explore films addressing diverse cultural responses to consumption, (over) development, and environmental racism and injustice. The book examines the post-pastoral negotiates a resolution between traditional pastoral and its anti-pastoral opposite.
