Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism

Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism – the journal for the Ireland and UK offshoot of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) – centres around the connections between art, literature, and popular culture and the way they relate to the more theoretical and scientific conceptualisations of the environment. Like with Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (also published by ASLE), there is a ready political focus, with discussions focussed on how ideas put forward in literature can aid in our understanding and activism concerning the current environmental crisis. Often this includes the intersection of ecocriticism with other theoretical approaches such as musicology and postcolonialism. This comes across particularly strongly in the themed issues of each volume (e.g. 2016, Vol. 16:1, ‘Global and Postcolonial Ecologies’). Many of the articles included in Green Letters relate to later periods of (largely anglophone) literature, but there are some which discuss the cultures and texts of the ancient Mediterranean (see example below). In such articles, there is a pervading theme of how Classical societies conceptualised their environments and how those ideas can in turn be used to help with understanding modern ecological problems.

Example Quotation

Green Letters seeks ‘to illuminate the divergences and convergences among representations and rhetorics of nature – understood as potentially including wild, rural, urban and virtual spaces – within the context of the global environmental crisis.’

[Green Letters Aims & Scope (tandfonline.com) Accessed 30/05/2023, 17:30]

Articles of Potential Interest

Ryan Denson (2021), ‘Divine Nature and the Natural Divine: The Marine Folklore of Pliny the Elder’, Green Letters Vol. 25, 143-154.

• An ecocritical reading of Pliny’s Natural History, particularly the discussions of the sea and the mythical creatures which occupy it. Argues that Pliny conceptualises Nature as its own distinct divinity.

Laurence Coupe (2009), ‘Genesis and the Nature of Myth’, Green Letters Vol. 11, 9-22.

• Discusses links between ancient creation myths and contemporary ecological thought, through discussions of the Book of Genesis as well as the myth of Gaia as put forward in Hesiod’s Theogony.

John G. Fitch (2009), ‘Nature in Horace’, Green Letters Vol. 11, 23-35.

• Reads Horace’s poetry with the idea that the representations of nature as integral to understanding his view of human life and as a guide for human behaviour.