Ecocriticism in English Literature - Environmental Tradition and the Notion of Nature in Literary Text

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It has only been two centuries since the color of green was associated with Nature's universal robe. A more enduring view of Nature has been its association with "everything", stemming from the pre-Socratic era's usage of the Greek word phusis. Successively demoted by the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Christian conceptions, Nature's meaning has changed. As medieval Christianity established the Creator of phusis, Nature became a symbolic creature representing the world derived from chaos. The name, "Nature", enabled the personification or apotheosis of it, which has proved its most potent sense to the present day. Then the late eighteenth century saw an enormous shrinkage in the meaning, "Nature" coming to mean the green landscape in the works of the Romantic poets.We are the descendents of the Romantics, since we owe the modern notion of Nature and this appreciation of our environment and ecosystem to them. Consider, for instance, Wordsworth's well-known phrase "We murder to dissect" in "The Tables Turned" - a highlight of his love of and sympathy with Nature inseparable from his critique of contemporary scientific rationalism. The spiritual wandering of Wordsworth and Tanabe in search of "disinterested love for nature's disinterested beauty" may exemplify human's predestined journey in search of ecological coexistence with our environment. Man repeats this journey every day, every year, and every century.