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.

The period from 1851 to 1877 is a critical transitional moment when ecology as a scientific field of study did not yet exist but was emerging. American scientists tended to rely on a Romantic science that prioritized nature’s organicism, but their criteria for empirical observation would lead to detailed and differentiated views that would help shape a modern ecology less insistent on holistic ideals and more open to incomplete and mutable forms in nature. For many writers, naturalists, and scientists, their approaches to nature were explicitly tied to considerations of the relationship between matter and spirit, and to the study of nature as a legible “book” whose material language, or littera, was inscribed everywhere as the environment and as forms of life.1 Scientific and cultural knowledge in this era shared an understanding that one could observe, that is, “read” nature. “Metaphor,” “type,” “translation,” and even “leaves” were objects of both biological and literary study. Through the sciences of this period, we can see how scientists interpreted nature as a literary text; and through the literature, how nature was read and written as a living thing.