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

绿色与大自然的普遍长袍联系在一起，这仅仅是两个世纪前的事了。一种更持久的关于自然的观点是它与“万物”的联系，源于前苏格拉底时代对希腊语“phusis”的使用。自然的意义先后被柏拉图、亚里士多德和基督教的观念贬低，发生了变化。随着中世纪基督教确立了“万物之主”，“自然”成为一种象征性的生物，代表了从混沌中衍生出来的世界。“自然”这个名字，使它成为人格化或神化，这证明了它的最有力的意义，直到今天。然后到了18世纪晚期，“自然”的含义大幅缩水，在浪漫主义诗人的作品中，“自然”的意思是绿色的风景。我们是浪漫主义者的后代，因为我们对自然的现代观念以及对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《颠倒的桌子》中那句著名的“我们谋杀是为了解剖”——这是他对自然的热爱和同情的一个突出表现，与他对当代科学理性主义的批判密不可分。华兹华斯和田边追求“对自然之美无私的爱”的精神漫游，或许是人类寻求与环境生态共存的宿命之旅的一个例证。人类每天、每年、每个世纪都在重复这一旅程。

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.