Output details

Ecocriticism

I have been appointed to write the essays for 2011, 2012 and 2013, following Greg Garrard’s term of office (see Garrard, Output 4). This is the essay (11,951 words) analysing the work published in 2011. As described also here under Garrard’s entry, the method is to review the entire field of publications in ecocriticism in the year in question, make a judgment about which were the most significant, and write an essay describing and analysing those works. For each year, the essay is a narrative of ecocriticism’s progress. The research question is: what are the most significant trends in this critical movement, and how effectively are the trends - the sub-fields within the field, such as postcolonial ecocriticism and New Materialism - developing their core ideas and methods, and responding to intellectual challenges? These influential essays identify and analyse the most impressive and the most significant (not necessarily the same thing) contributions of the year, but also ask, contributions to what? What is the overall shape of this critical movement? How effectively are its different elements engaging with each other’s challenges, and how effectively is the movement as a whole engaging with challenges from other movements in critical and cultural theory?