7 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
stewards of the earth and its limited resources. The essays in Lewis Thomas’s The
Lives of a Cell (1974) suggest a “dependent” role when he writes “we are not the
masters of nature that we thought ourselves; we are as dependent on the rest of
life as are the leaves or midges or fish.”
Several anthologies and studies serve as introductory guides to the world of
nature or environmental writing while highlighting representative writers and
works. The Norton Book of Nature Writing (1990), edited by Finch and Elder,
contains key nature writers such as Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, and Peter
Matthiessen. Their introduction also identifies ways to delineate and categorize
nature writing, a difficult task considering the vastness of this field. Finch and
Elder trace a literary genealogy back to pastoral poetry and the natural history
essay. In This Incomparable Land: A Guide to American Nature Writing (2001),
Thomas Lyons categorizes works based on the “relative weight or interplay”
of three characteristics he finds in environmental literature: “natural history
information, personal responses to nature, and philosophical interpretation of
nature.” The focus of these two important works, however, is almost exclusively
limited to nonfiction prose. For a rich selection of poems, students can consider
Poems for a Small Planet: Contemporary American Nature Poetry (1993), which
features established nature poets Maxine Kumin, Dana Gioia, Joy Harjo, and
Gary Snyder. Despite their differences in tone and style, all respond to the
destruction of nature.
Until the late 1990s studies of nature and environmental literature, like the
anthologies previously described, focused on nonfiction prose with some atten-
tion to poetry. Making assumptions about the practical purposes and uses of
writing, critics and editors tended to privilege works whose purposes were more
didactic than entertaining, distinctions made by Finch and Elder, who exclude
works that are imaginative rather than “real” because “the purposes of fiction
differ sufficiently from those of nonfiction.” Laurence Buell also discusses this
distinction in The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the
Formation of American Culture (1995). In Farther Af ield in the Study of Nature-
Oriented Literature (2000), however, Patrick D. Murphy challenges this oversight.
Noting the “fiction” involved in the aesthetic restructuring of journals, chronicles,
and natural histories such as Thoreau’s Walden (1854), he offers a more inclusive
taxonomy of nature-oriented literature that includes work previously neglected
in the field of environmental literary criticism. Students interested in identifying
fiction that treats environmental issues will find Murphy’s study of contemporary
science fiction and fantasy, ethnic American, and Postmodernist works useful.
Interest in nature and environmental writing has given rise to ecocriticism, a
term coined in the 1970s to describe criticism sensitive to environmental themes.
An interdisciplinary strategy, it considers history, ethics, philosophy, science,
and psychology in addition to literary analysis to uncover explicit and implicit
attitudes toward the environment. Ecocriticism promotes the value of writing
concerned with nature (by identifying important texts), while also attempting to
effect change by creating awareness of the interconnectedness between human-
ity and the natural world (as expressed in the works they study). The Ecocriticism
Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996), edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and