Eco-Modernism

The chapters which make up this volume form a collection of criticism surrounding ecology, environment, and nature in literary modernism. The first of its kind to serve as a major guide for ecology in modernist criticism ( an intersection termed “eco-modernism” ( this collection explores the green consciousness, eco-poetics, anthropocentric awareness, and ideas of interconnectivity evidenced in a myriad of modernist experimentations in form, genre, style, and imagery. The first section takes up ruralism in modernist novel and poetry to delineate modernists’ literary responses to natural spaces and existences. Essays in the second section employ various poetic works to reveal how modernists adapted their writing for new revelations of ecological meaning. The third section maintains a consideration of verse through its focus on eco-poetics, bridging ecological discovery to the biographical and scientific worlds in which modernist poets wrote. In the fourth section, scholars locate agricultural and horticultural realities in the earthen soil observed and discussed in foundational modernist literatures. The final section invokes questions of the Anthropocene through readings of climactic modernist texts to encourage an ongoing inclusion of anthropocentric questions in modernist criticism. Importantly, these essays join in commencing necessary deliberations on the nonhuman in literary modernity, extending critical attention to an ecological and natural beyond in a field too often confined to the human and the urban and becoming a work of advocacy for a future of continued modernist inquiry alongside continued ecological awareness.