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Ecocritical approaches to Renaissance literature.

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Abstract

This essay both presents educators with an overview of ecocritical approaches to Renaissance literature, as well as suggests ways they may be brought into the classroom. In particular, it provides a strategy for introducing students to the somewhat startling revelation that many of today's most topical environmental issues, such as deforestation, unchecked mining, development of wetlands, and the willful elimination of endangered species, were also pressing concerns for Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.

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When confronted with the image of a literal dark cloud of air pollution hanging over Coketown in Dickens's Hard Times, a broad swath of students is immediately persuaded both that our current environmental crisis has roots in the nineteenth century, and that writers of the time were already chronicling its growth. However, turn the clock back two centuries, to Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and students and teachers alike are remarkably resistant to the notion that the roots of the crisis could possibly reach back so far. There are, I think, principally two reasons for this. First, in spite of a virtual avalanche of work by historians in the past twenty years exploring the Medieval and Renaissance origins of the so-called Industrial Revolution, in the popular imagination this still very much remains a nineteenth-century revolution. Second, and ironically, the successes of the ecocritical movement itself may have inadvertently fostered this very view. Because some of the most important work in the field, such as that done by ecocritics Lawrence Buell and Jonathan Bates [1], focuses on literature from the nineteenth century--the very period most students still associate with the rise of technological modernity--this underscores for many that this is through-and-through a nineteenth-century phenomenon. The purpose of the present essay is to present educators with an overview of ecocritical approaches to Renaissance literature, as well as to introduce important primary and secondary sources for possible further consideration.

Any attempt to introduce a "green" reading of Renaissance literature in the classroom must begin by making clear that many of today's most topical environmental issues, such as deforestation, unchecked mining, development of wetlands, and the willful elimination of endangered...

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