July 2020
20
ISSN 2278 0742
Ecocriticism: An Overview Mansha Malik
Abstract
Human being has played havoc with the world of nature by selfishly manipulating its vast resources and subsequently causing irreversible damage. To satisfy his insatiable material greed, he desired to control nature for his own benefits and has been ceaselessly marauding and damaging the world he inhabits by the pollution and destruction caused primarily by his own actions. The ensuing ecological imbalance triggered the realization of a worldwide environmental crisis and various new concepts and fields emerged as a reaction against the environmental damage having the sole purpose of understanding the real problems of environmental destruction and critiquing them. Similarly in literature, a sense of environmental crisis necessitated the opening of a new branch of literary theory – a theory that scrutinizes our relationship with the external world.
The paper attempts to give an overview of ecocriticism—relatively an unexplored interdisciplinary trend in literature—that aims at establishing a correlation between literary expression and the physical environment. Just like any other literary theory, ecocriticism is defined differently by various critics but unlike many other theories there is no particular, single method to approach a text. Ecocritics vary in their methods as they vary in their way of defining ecocriticism. Therefore, apart from dealing with the development of ecocriticism as a theory and its various issues and concerns the paper attempts to deliberate on the different developmental phases of ecocriticism as propounded separately by theorists like Cheryll Glotfelty, Lawerence Buell, Scott Slovic and Joni Adamson.
Key Words: Nature, Exploitation, Non-Human, Critique, Interdisciplinary
Volume 9 Issue 2
www.ijells.com
