Concern with the environment in the broad sense is necessarily as old as human culture. The initial impetus of modern ecocriticism,
however, lies some two centuries in the past, in a broadly romantic tradition of opposition to the destructive tendencies
of enlightenment ideals of the conquest of nature, the market-based economy and industrialism. Romantic here is meant both in the historical period sense – a complex cultural movement of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
– but also, as romantic with a small r, to name continuing and deeply engrained modes of thought that oppose industrial society with ideas of ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’ as modes of secular redemption.
Romanticism in that sense remains a powerful feature of mainstream culture. It is also, since the 1790s, a basis of the numerous
forms of countercultural and alternative cultural movements appealing to notions of nature and the natural as norms of health,
vitality or beauty and as precisely what commercial/industrial society represses or destroys, both in the human psyche and
in the surrounding environment.
Such arguments have been the predominant context for environmental politics.
Jonathan Bate writes: ‘if one historicizes the idea of
an ecological viewpoint – a respect for the earth and a scepticism as to the orthodoxy that economic growth and material production
are the be-all and end-all of human society – one finds oneself squarely in the Romantic tradition’.
1However, when it comes to what countermeasures to advocate, things become less assured. In this respect, ingrained romantic
structures of thought have also been seen as restricting the intellectual scope of ecocriticism.
Robert
Kirkham sums up some romantic arguments in danger of becoming stale formulae:
against mechanism, posit organicism…against dualism, posit the unity of mind and nature; against the primacy of
reason, posit the value of intuition or of feeling; against instrumentalism, posit intrinsic value; against alienation, posit
a primordial state of harmony to which we must strive to return. In short, the imperative of relatedness-thinking is to repersonalize,
resacralize, and respiritualize the world. This, at least in part, is why we are told from all quarters that we must rethink
our ‘relationship’ with our environment.
2
Up to the mid 1990s, the terms of such ‘relatedness-thinking’ would have commanded widespread assent among green literary
critics. Since that time, however, such arguments have had to defend and refine themselves against various kinds of criticism.
Do some dubious assumptions underlie the supposed desirability of a closer relation to the natural? Thinkers have increasingly
come to question deeply ingrained presuppositions that the
‘natural’, as opposed to the cultural, necessarily names a condition of balance, harmony, stability and health. They argue
that what critics and writers in the romantic tradition have often called ‘nature’
or ‘natural’ have been insufficiently examined, and that the terms act sometimes as an unacknowledged norm in arguments that
belong more properly to openly contentious political debate. Is
ecocriticism only ‘another version of Romanticism's rage against the machine, a refusal to engage the present moment’ (
Timothy Morton)?
3This section offers a broad overview of the elements of environmental criticism closely connected to traditions of romantic
thinking, stressing its key features, and also the way it has increasingly been questioned. Chapters on questions of genre
and language introduce in turn some other key issues in debates often framed by romantic assumptions. The philosopher, Martin Heidegger, usually assimilated to the romantic tradition, is also considered here. This subsection of the book ends
on the topic of ‘post-humanism’, with its polemically anti-romantic conceptions of the human and of the natural world.
Overall, environmentalism is now still working through the problem that, even as the issues it addresses have become more
pressing, the inherited concepts and language that may engage them have become less assured.