Eco-criticism

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in Stratford, East London in July 1844. Situated just beyond the metropolitan boundary, then, as now, the area was changing rapidly. With the arrival of the Great Eastern Railway’s locomotive works it was “cut up in all directions by branches of railways” (Olsen 1976: 275-6) but also suffered, as Norman White points out, as a consequence of London’s environmental diligence.

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Because American ecocriticism, as a movement, is only about a dozen years old, generalizations about it are hard to make and still harder to validate.1 So I want to begin, not by describing the principles and practices of ecocriticism in any detail (in fact, that is something I want to delay, especially as regards the practices, until chapter four), but by looking at what seems to be, for many of its adherents, ecocriticism’s moment of origin, which is threefold in its implications.

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