The Future of Environmental Criticism

Buell, L. (2005). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Buell provides a roadmap to environmental criticism and its current approaches and trends that are always ‘in motion.’ Buell’s choice of ‘environmental’ rather than ‘eco’ captures the hybrid, interdisciplinarity of this approach combining literature, culture, and the environment and linking the natural world with the constructed. The first chapter charts the ancient roots and recent emergence of environmental criticism and then divides it into two waves. Where the first wave made a distinction between nature and culture to encourage care for the Earth, the increasingly self-critical and reflexive second wave questions this division by including both natural and built environments in its conception of place and investigates the intersections of the local and global. The following three chapters then explore environmental criticism’s predominant concerns: environmental imagining and representation (chapter 2), its reconception of place in art and lived experience (chapter 3), and its ethical and political commitment (chapter 4). Buell closes the work by considering environmental criticism’s future and arguing its significance and legacy will rest in introducing a new perspective and topic to literary studies: environmentality rather than an original methodological approach. Buell’s work is useful to classicists because it provides an overview of the trajectory of environmental criticism, one which is interested in ‘opening up’ rather than foreclosing its boundaries, as well as an extensive glossary explaining its key terms. Throughout there is brief consideration of environmental criticism’s ancient roots in early cosmological and creation stories (p. 2), the role of setting in Aristotelian poetic theory (p. 3), and literary world-making and placemaking in ancient literary authors like Homer, Plato, and Timaeus (pp. 90-96).