Book Review of Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context // Reseña de Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context

Abstract

In his short entry on "Ecocriticism" in the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, Laurie Ricou notes that "Canadian literary studies, with their long-standing interest in nature, wilderness, and landscape, might be said to have always been ecocritical" (324). His assertion is directly addressed in the editors' introduction to this anthology, and to some extent Greening the Maple may be deemed a substantiation of Ricou's claim. Ella Soper and Nicholas Bradley describe the aim of the anthology as providing a "retrospective, curatorial account of the field" (xiv) by tracing "the past and present of Canadian ecocriticism" (xv). In bringing together essays that deal with the environment and literature from specifically Canadian perspectives, including essays that long predate first wave ecocriticism per se, the anthology embeds Canadian ecocriticism in a historical context, thereby convincingly showing Canadian literary and critical concerns with various aspects of the representation of nature to be more than just a widelyspread stereotype. Indeed, the editors demonstrate that Canadian literature and Canadian literary studies have been informed by what could be deemed ecocritical ideas well before the institutionalisation of ecocriticism from the 1990s onward. By framing Canadian ecocriticism as a development from the thematic criticism that dominated literary studies in Canada during the 1960s and 1970s (xxvii), Soper and Bradley detail an ecocritical lineage which diverts from the usual narratives that habitually trace the institutional recognition of ecocriticism as a discipline to publications on the Romantics and Transcendentalists, such as