Ecocriticism: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Literature and Environment Ecocriticism, also known as environmental criticism or “green” criticism (especially in England), is a rapidly emerging field of literary studies that examines the relationship between human beings and the natural environment. It explores how nature and the natural world are represented in literary texts and how these representations shape and reflect cultural attitudes toward the environment. As Cheryll Glotfelty observes in the introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader , ecocriticism functions much like other critical approaches: just as feminist criticism analyses literature from a gender-conscious perspective and Marxist criticism focuses on class and economic structures, ecocriticism studies literature from an environmental perspective. It investigates how literary texts imagine nature and how these imaginings contribute to cultural perceptions of the environment. Therefore, understanding literary repres...