Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures

Abstract

Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures is not the first, and it is not the last, but it is certainly among the best of the books that have appeared in recent years doing ecocriticism with the early modern period. The strengths of Todd Borlik's book are many, the weaknesses few indeed. Inspired in the ecocritical tradition by a desire “to imagine more sustainable ways of inter-acting with and dwelling on the earth” (54), Borlik begins his study with an extended grounding in and discussion of Pythagorus and his importance for the early modern period and for how, to some degree, “the personification of Nature in Renaissance literature . . . can be seen in a continuum with the branch of Pythagorean philosophy that encouraged its followers to become pious, awestruck observers of the harmony in the natural world” (67–68). The chapter that follows, entitled “Mute Timber,” is a breath-taking and meticulous case for “complicating reductive views that fail to see the forest for the commercial trees and amplifying a voice in nature at a time when it was increasingly muted by agrarian capitalism” (96).