Introduction

Tracing ecological and ecocritical conversations across modernist scholarship, this chapter foregrounds a growing critical engagement with the natural in modernist literature to support the necessity and diversity of environmental considerations in modernism. Recognizing scholarship’s typical alignment of the modern with the urban, it validates a discursive turn by presenting voices who have effectively positioned the modern with the natural. The essay assigns such discussions the term “eco-modernism” and highlights the critical possibilities in modernist subjects beyond the novelistic and canonical through ecocritical lenses ranging widely from ruralism, ecology, and ecopoetry to agriculture, horticulture, and the Anthropocene. The chapter ultimately contends that modernist writers were conscious and committed to literary engagement with the environment, and hence their work provides a fruitful place for modernist inquiry. Under the purposive analogy of extending boundaries, this essay introduces methods and subjects of eco-modernism beyond traditional ecocritical approaches to encourage a flourishing intellectual investment in both theoretical and ecological diversity.