The Greening of Milton Criticism

Abstract

Ecocriticism is an offshoot of the environmental movements that developed during the second half of the twentieth century and takes as its field of study literary treatments of the relationship between human beings and the physical environment. When it became established as a recognizable critical school during the 1990s, it was dominated by analyses of British Romantic poetry and literature of the American wilderness. In the present decade, its scope has been deliberately extended to include work from the early modern period. As early as the 1980s, however, the poetry of John Milton had begun to attract attention from critics with an interest in ecological concerns. Paradise Lost in particular became a key text for those who sought to resist the charge that the exploitation of the natural world was licensed by a homocentric Christian tradition based on the Biblical command to ‘subdue’ the earth and ‘have dominion’ over the creatures. An alternative to this tradition has been found in Milton’s conception of the newly created earth as a living organism, his dramatization of Eve’s response to the further Biblical command to ‘dress’ and ‘keep’ the garden of Eden, and his recognition of the ecological consequences of ‘man’s first disobedience’. Recent books and articles have begun to locate ecological readings of the epic and other poems by Milton within the contexts of seventeenth‐century developments in land management and materialist philosophy, the origins of modern scientific natural history, and the beginnings of anxiety about such environmental issues as pollution, the treatment of animals, and deforestation.

Environmental Renaissance Studies

“…The model normally used to describe the development of ecocriticism – the sequence of waves suggested by Lawrence Buell – is not appropriate for renaissance environmental studies, given that the early modern period was all but ignored by the first wave . Diane McColley's work is an exception to this, with Milton ' s Eve () the first of several studies that offer an ecological approach to Milton criticism (see Wilcher). Despite its slow start elsewhere, though, ecocriticism of early modern literature and drama has proliferated, and this is evidenced by the increased frequency of special issues and edited collections.…”