Introduction

Summary

In “The Nature of Literature,” Peter Remien and Scott Slovic examine nature’s role in the history of literary studies from Aristotle’s Poetics to the modern environmental humanities. The chapter begins with a close analysis of Sidney’s The Defense of English Poesy as an example of the premodern understanding of the parallel creative processes of art and nature. Not only does art imitate nature, as Aristotle asserts, but it furthers nature’s creative purposes. The chapter then constructs a genealogy of ecocriticism with attention to nature’s contested role as a central keyword. Attentive to nature’s ideological and metaphysical baggage, Remien and Slovic examine important critiques of the concept of nature by Derrida, Timothy Morton, and others, as well as claims of “the end of nature” in the Anthropocene. The final part of the introduction traces a broad history of nature in literary studies through an overview of the book’s three sections and twenty-one chapters.