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

仅仅两个世纪以来，绿色才与大自然的万能长袍联系在一起。对自然的一种更持久的看法是，它与“万物”联系在一起，源于前苏格拉底时代希腊单词Phusis的使用。先后被柏拉图、亚里士多德和基督教的观念降级后，自然的意义已经改变。随着中世纪基督教确立了普希斯的创造者，自然成为了一种象征性的生物，代表了从混乱中衍生出来的世界。“自然”这个名字使它得以人格化或神化，这已被证明是它最有力的意义，直到今天。到了18世纪末，“自然”的含义大大缩水，在浪漫主义诗人的作品中，“自然”指的是绿色的风景。我们是浪漫主义的后裔，因为我们对自然的现代观念以及对我们的环境和生态系统的欣赏都归功于他们。例如，想想华兹华斯在《转盘》中的那句广为人知的话：我们杀人是为了解剖--这是他对自然的热爱和同情的突出表现，这与他对当代科学理性主义的批判是分不开的。华兹华斯和田边寻求“无私的爱自然的无私之美”的精神流浪，可以作为人类寻求与环境生态共存的宿命之旅的例证。人类每天、每一年、每一个世纪都在重复这段旅程。

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.