The Rhetoric History of Culture and Nature: The Return of the Native

Abstract

The effects of industrialization during the Victorian era on the environment in Britain were huge, leading to numerous criticisms. Despite this, there has been limited research done with an ecocritical approach to the Victorians’ interactions with the environment. Further, only a handful of scholars have analyzed Victorian novelists’ representations of their time’s ecology. This article discusses the relationship between man and nature as represented in Thomas Hardy’s novel “The Return of the Native”. Analyzing this work helps us understand Victorian ecological and social criticism of the linkage between man and environment, often considered at the time to be psychologically and biologically strange and intriguing. Analyzing the novel’s different characters and their qualities and interactions with the environment helps us to understand the link between man and his environment today. This article explains how and why Hardy portrays the place of man in the world using the setting of Egdon Heath. Keywords: Culture, Land, Ecocritism, Nature, Writing, Ecosystem, Environmental Rhetoric.