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  • Introduction

  • Edited by Peter Remien, Lewis-Clark State College, Idaho, Scott Slovic, University of Idaho
  • Book: Nature and Literary Studies
  • Published online: 22 July 2022
  • Print publication: 04 August 2022, pp 1-28

  • Summary

    In “The Nature of Literature,” Peter Remien and Scott Slovic examine nature’s role in the history of literary studies from Aristotle’s Poetics to the modern environmental humanities. The chapter begins with a close analysis of Sidney’s The Defense of English Poesy as an example of the premodern understanding of the parallel creative processes of art and nature. Not only does art imitate nature, as Aristotle asserts, but it furthers nature’s creative purposes. The chapter then constructs a genealogy of ecocriticism with attention to nature’s contested role as a central keyword. Attentive to nature’s ideological and metaphysical baggage, Remien and Slovic examine important critiques of the concept of nature by Derrida, Timothy Morton, and others, as well as claims of “the end of nature” in the Anthropocene. The final part of the introduction traces a broad history of nature in literary studies through an overview of the book’s three sections and twenty-one chapters.

Nature and Literary Studies
  • Edited by Peter Remien, Scott Slovic
  • Published online: 22 July 2022
  • Print publication: 04 August 2022
  • Nature and Literary Studies supplies a broad and accessible overview of one of the most important and contested keywords in modern literary studies. Drawing together the work of leading scholars of a variety of critical approaches, historical periods, and cultural traditions, the book examines nature's philosophical, theological, and scientific origins in literature, as well as how literary representations of this concept evolved in response to colonialism, industrialization, and new forms of scientific knowledge. Surveying nature's diverse applications in twenty-first-century literary studies and critical theory, the volume seeks to reconcile nature's ideological baggage with its fundamental role in fostering appreciation of nonhuman being and agency. Including chapters on wilderness, pastoral, gender studies, critical race theory, and digital literature, the book is a key resource for students and professors seeking to understand nature's role in the environmental humanities.

  • Introduction

  • Peter Remien, Lewis-Clark State College, Idaho
  • Book: The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature
  • Published online: 28 January 2019
  • Print publication: 14 February 2019, pp 1-32

  • Summary

    The conceptual foundations of ecology were laid in the seventeenth century by the natural philosopher Kenelm Digby, when he developed the idea of “the oeconomy of nature.” Digby transformed the practical agrarian discourse of “natural oeconomy” (household management), which links humans to their environments, into the natural-philosophical concept of the oeconomy of nature. Using the oeconomic values of thrift , regularity, and the ancient dispensation to conceptualize natural processes, Digby projected a human institution, with all its ideological baggage, onto the natural world. But, for Digby, closely observing nonhuman creatures in the framework of oeconomy opened up the more radical possibility of a decentered system, in which each creature is a potential householder, each the center of its own oeconomy of nature

  • Chapter 4 - Divine Husbandry

  • Peter Remien, Lewis-Clark State College, Idaho
  • Book: The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature
  • Published online: 28 January 2019
  • Print publication: 14 February 2019, pp 103-128

  • Summary

    Chapter 4 traces the influence of theological oikonomia – God’s providential governance of the world – on Herbert’s two major works: The Temple (1633) and The Country Parson (1652). For Herbert, human agency is a problem because it enables us to deviate from divine rule. As an alternative to the vicissitudes of human life, Herbert posits nonhuman creatures, particularly plants, as the ideal recipients of divine governance. In “Providence,” “Affliction (I),” and “Employment (II),” God is the agent of arboreal care. When Herbert characterizes his poetry as “my first fruits” in “The Dedication” – the opening poem in The Temple – he positions himself as a tree, passively producing fruit for God. The oeconomy of production thus comes full circle as the fruits return to God, their ultimate source. The poet, a tree in the service of God, is subsumed within the oeconomy of divine providence.

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