ABSTRACT
When Jonathan Bate called for the development of a British 'literary ecocriticism'1 he was inviting us to re-read literature from contemporary ecological perspectives, knowing that references to land, weather, and creatures are always socially constructed by our language. To say 'land' is to say something different from 'landscape'. He also knew that our physical relationship with our planet has threatened our very existence in the material world that is prior to language, the actual land to which our language refers. Raymond Williams had already shown that our literary constructions of nature often fell into a pattern of ideological discourse that is typified by traditions of 'pastoral' and 'counter-pastoral'.2 An ecocritical reading of British poetry reveals the need for a term that characterizes writing which avoids the traps of the closed circuit both of pastoral and counter-pastoral constructions of nature to achieve what I have called a 'post-pastoral' notion of nature.3
