The Value of Ecocriticism

Timothy Clark. (2019). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clark’s book is not explicitly focussed on pre-modern texts. However, a running theme throughout is the recent expansion of ecocriticism in the past decade into a much wider variety of texts and genres than its original foci on English Romantic poetry and environmental non-fiction. Each chapter examines how ecocritical thinking can be applied to different modes of writing (e.g., poetry and prose) or how ecocriticism relates to other forms of literary criticism (e.g., postcolonialism). Clark also comments the anthropocentrism of the field and argues that is imperative for ecocritics to go beyond local and individual thinking and properly examine environmental questions and crises on a global scale, bringing in ideas and voices from a much wider cultural pool. Moreover, Clark defines the Anthropocene as less to do with geological time and more as a way of defining modernity and the rise of effects humans have made on the environment.